


Song Without A Name

by LadyYateXel



Series: Song Without A Name [1]
Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Reincarnation, Songfic, highschool, insert other embarrassing cliche here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 22:24:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 144,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyYateXel/pseuds/LadyYateXel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Reincarnation is complicated, and apparently, not a refined system. When the lines between lives are blurry at best, and memories seep in from the person you were, do you stay the person you are? Who do you want to be, and do you want to be seen?"</p><p>(Fic from 2005. Uploaded here by request. This story will follow me to every website I visit until I die.  Do me a favor and please read the rewritten version of this instead of this if this is your first experience with this story.  It's here on AO3 as well and is far, far better. )</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. My TV and You

**Author's Note:**

> This story is up at the request of people who desired it in Kindle-able format! 
> 
> SWAN was written from 2005 to 2008, and was the first writing I ever showed to anyone else, let alone put on the internet. For that reason, it is quite dear to me and makes me very nostalgic, but at the same time is filled with things that make me want to punch my younger self in the face. I would love it if you enjoyed this with that in mind! :)
> 
> The sequel to this story, I'm Still Here, will be posted here as well.

He’d been in horrible situations before. He’d even begun to think it was just the atrocious luck of the area he lived in that all the explosions, alien abductions, mutating elementary school students and random homicides went completely unnoticed. He’d been involved in some of those unnoticed incidents; he, himself, had been completely unnoticed. He’d been shredded in one lifetime, and nearly so in the next when he  _was_  noticed. Then, he had befriended the person almost responsible for the almost shredding. He’d seen Heaven, and he’d seen Hell. He’d done it all.

So who had chosen to force him through high school again?

6:15.

The alarm again. It had rung at that time everyday for almost three lifetimes now. Why did he still bother to set it? Habit, he assumed. Everything now was the same as always and always was always the same.

He had been reborn without a family a second time now. When he had been selected the first time around for Heaven’s beta testing of “Operation Reincarnation” (“We’re trying to cut back on soul density. And we’re running out of chairs.”), he had thought the basics would have already been covered. A family and parents seemed like logical needs for someone being re _born_.

He wasn’t bothered by it so much as confused; after all, he’d sort of always been alone. Plus, he had volunteered for “Operation Reincarnation 2” (“We’ve made a patch for the bugs! Let’s download one for your soul and send it through again!”), and he wasn’t about to jeopardize his participation in this mess by complaining.

High School again, of all things. Through the grace (and technical ineptitude) of Heaven’s Operation Reincarnation, he remembered and retained nearly all of the information he’d learned and memories he’d made, and thus, after showing great intelligence so early, was shuffled into a corner for ‘gifted’ students and never given another thought. After all, the faculty had so much other brainwashing to do to the other students. Who could waste time on him?

So, in his spare time, which was pretty much all of his time, he’d taken up piano. He had become especially fond of the keyboard in the band room, and would often fiddle with the synthetic key tones to see what parts of the band’s practice material he could mimic. He was fairly invisible there, with the band students. No one thought twice about some guy messing with a keyboard in the band room; everyone just assumed he was a straggler from the prior class, and made no mention of him.

He’d also taken some interest in the choir room next door, but wasn’t able to camouflage so well in there. It was only when asked to run a trivial errand or make a delivery in a rare moment of visibility that he could sneak in to listen. Nearly every time he slipped inside, there was the sound of someone singing loudly in the back room. He never saw them leave, and never saw them enter, and would have assumed the voice to be a recording if it didn’t sometimes stop, cough, curse, and pick up where it left off.

These sorts of things helped him pass the time while stuck in this life day after day. He had been promised by the workers in the reincarnation project that he’d find a certain someone so long as he stayed on their “Proven Path to Second Life Success.” (Name Pending.) This apparently equated to “Stay In School.”

Upon his most recent death, he had discovered the discarded form of the one he'd been told was indirectly responsible for said death lying on the non-existent ground in front of the Pearly Gates which at the time were replaced with tin foil replicas. (The real deal was due for ‘renovations.’) He had offered then to participate in the project again if the discarded soul, who had become oddly dear to him, could be reborn and found again as well. So far, no luck.

7:15.

Right, should probably attempt to get to school at some point…

The school was only a few blocks away, and he usually enjoyed the walk, or at least found it beneficial. It gave him time to think about entirely too much. He enjoyed the few minutes of exercise and contemplation, although the thinking often made him a little gloomy afterwards.

He was, as always, on time, and entered the building, passing a small tribe of leather clad individuals with cigarettes who were presumably too cool by their own definitions to be in the building by the first bell. Of all people in the school, it would have been most logical, and definitely easiest, for him, the most invisible student to have ever lived, to be late, and in most cases absent. Yet, despite all that, he came everyday, perfectly punctual.

He reported to his homeroom. They didn’t call his name again, as usual, and he had stopped expecting them to. The bell rang, and he made his routine unnoticed way to the band room. The singing had started next door already. He had been able to identify the voice as male, he thought, and wondered vaguely who it was that was just as invisible as he that they were able to spend the entire day, everyday, singing in the choir room.

He entered the band room, and began to set down his things. The room was usually empty at this time of day, but today he noticed an acne-faced guy was loudly discussing guitars with the band director. He watched Acne-Face leave after falling victim to an uninterested band teacher. Such an odd feeling of familiarity struck him when Acne-Face looked at him. He shrugged it off, attributed it to his layers upon layers of memories of faces, and resigned himself, once again, to the keyboard.

The room remained as usual after that. He was beginning to question the nature of his almost invisibility, and had a hard time focusing on the music because of it. Why did most people seem to walk right by him, bump into him, talk through him as though he didn’t exist, while others, like Acne-Face, made a point to stare at him? He wondered, for a moment, if the person he was looking for would see him there, or if he himself had missed that person because they too were just as invisible. The thought depressed him greatly, and seemed to make the day crawl. As every class filed in, he inspected every face, just to be positive, once again, that the one he was looking for wasn’t there. As always, no luck.

Several hours later, he made the decision to actually eat lunch, despite his total lack of appetite lately. As he made his way to the cafeteria, he realized it was chicken nugget day, evidenced by the massively long lines. He decided against the nuggets and thought he’d just grab a small bag of chips from the little snack hut in the corner. The hut itself was a little beyond the rarely visited salad bar, which he sidestepped around to avoid bumping into.

He bought the tiny overpriced bag of chips, and hoped to make his way back to the band room before someone noticed that he had been invisible all these years. Staring at the floor in an effort to hide himself further, he slid along the side of the salad bar and smashed into a pale girl actually getting a salad. Horrified, he looked up her. Would she scream and draw all sorts of unwanted attention? He tried to mumble an apology, but the words wouldn’t come.

She only gave him a strange eyebrow raise, then turned and merged into the crowd of people in the cafeteria, purple pigtails bobbing in and out of view.

So she could see him, too. Or was it only because he had crashed into her? That usually wasn’t enough to do it in the hallways. People had run into him before, and usually mentioned something about untied shoes, or just being uncoordinated. Never once had anyone mentioned running into a person, let alone attempted apology. No one had ever looked directly into his eyes, even the people he had made a point to speak to.

He found himself back at the keyboard. When had he started walking back? He figured it didn’t really matter all that much, and sat down to eat his now crumbled chips. There was a painfully small amount of them in that little bag; it was a good two-thirds air, after all, so he finished them quickly.  He sat in the room, which was now completely silent, and stared at the keys. He tried to will the keys to play something, but nothing came. At the moment he was about to plant his face into the keys in frustration, he heard the voice from the choir room again. It was louder than usual, and this time, the lyrics were almost audible through the wall.

_“…Take me how I am_  
'cause you know I'll never change  
I was born to stare  
At who stares back at me  
If I make it up  
To that big show in the sky  
All I really want  
Is my TV and you…”

In his interest to listen, he failed to notice, again, that he had gotten up and moved. He found himself in the choir room, no longer afraid to be noticed, ear pressed against the little office door. The song trailed off after that, and he strained to hear more, trying to press his ear closer. He could think of no reason to be so drawn to this person, or this song, because he didn’t know either, but something in him made him want to claw through the thick wood of the locked door to get to whoever was behind it. That person who was just as invisible as he, who sung songs that felt so real to his situation, who-

“Hey.”

He jumped, any and all bravery quickly evaporated.

“Let’s try not to cause more than one accident a day, OK?”

The girl from the cafeteria stood over him, holding the salad tray in one hand, a key in the other. He looked up at her, stunned, and shuffled across the floor, out of the way of the door. She looked at him quizzically, and unlocked the door. Stepping inside, she announced that she had brought lunch to whoever was inside. The singer responded by turning up the stereo. He heard the voice from before, and what he now assumed was the voice of that girl singing bits of the song together.

The door was still ajar beside him, but he was too petrified to move to get a look. The song, the girl’s voice, especially the fact that she had had spoken directly to him, and the fear of smashing the image he had in his head of  the person who had intrigued him all this time, all kept him frozen. He sat there on the floor until the last measures of the song faded away, and eased their grip on him.

_“When I close my eyes_  
 _I am at the Center of the Sun_  
 _And I cannot be hurt_  
 _By anything this wicked world has done…_

_Cause I hear violins..._  
 _I hear violins…”_

He shook his head and looked around. Where was he? On the floor… of the choir room. He whirled around, and hit his head on the door frame. Rubbing his head, he stared upward at the door. It was locked again. Had he fallen asleep? If so, for how long? Had the girl left? What about his elusive singer? Had they just left him there on the floor? What time was it?

3:15.

His watch told him school hours had long since been over.

He rose shakily to his feet, and brushed some dirt from his jeans. Everything was so quiet after hours. Out in the hall, he heard some scraping, which he assumed to be the janitor. He made his way back to the band room, gathered the few things he had brought with him, and headed towards the building’s exit.

His head throbbing from the bump earlier, he reached up and rubbed it slightly. He was concerned that the events in the room frightened him so much. What was it about some girl with a salad, and a mystery person singing in the back corners of the choir room that managed to make him pass out? He kept replaying the scenario over and over in his head, each time thinking the girl looked oddly more and more familiar.  He eventually told himself he was  _trying_  to make her look that way, and abandoned any thoughts that he could possibly know her.

He left the school, pausing only once in front of it to sigh in frustration over the entire mess, and began his trip home. The walk that was usually so nice and refreshing now only contributed to his confusion and worry. The girl, the voice, the songs, the invisibility; nothing would leave his mind alone for very long.  Why had it all affected him the way it had? Was there something yet in this reincarnation project that he had yet to understand? He found himself wishing that he could talk to the people in charge of it, but that would require dying, something he wasn’t quite ready to do again if he could help it.

*****

He didn’t sleep that night, predictably. What sleeping he did do was littered with dreams and nightmares, almost always smatterings of thoughts and experiences from his past attempts at being alive. The moment when he died in his first life, shredded by some insane contraption in a basement. The same moment in his second life when he had been saved by television and a short attention span. Some stranger, more abstract forms floated in and out of his mental turmoil, waking him up more than once. The girl from the cafeteria, and a strange disembodied version of that voice from the choir room trying to consume him, while the people in charge of giving him these multiple chances at life laughed at him, and showered him in empty potato chip bags.

He woke one last time, after being haunted by one too many images of the one he was searching for floating through walls, expanding to fill an entire room, and suffocating him. He sat on the edge of his bed, and rubbed his head. The glowing green numbers on his clock told him he needed to be up in an hour and a half anyway, so he struggled with his exhausted body, and managed to get dressed.

The walk back to the school filled him with odd feelings. His body wanted to sleep, and some deep part of him was even more exhausted, but his curiosity pulled him towards the school. He absolutely had to find the girl and see the person singing now. He had to. He needed to know why he had passed out, why he had been left there, and what had happened beyond that door.

He didn’t bother reporting to his homeroom, they hadn’t called for him to be there yet, and he had no reason to believe today would be any different. Instead, he slipped into the band room, put his bag down by the keyboard, and quietly approached the choir room. Since he was a little early today, there was a possibility he would catch that person, that singer. He tried to appear casual, assured and at ease, as though anyone would care that he was standing there in the choir room doorway in the first place.

Several minutes passed. There was no movement. What if his mystery singer had gotten there before him? He gingerly crept into the room, and rested his cheek against the door that he had heard the music coming from behind the day before. The music that had seemingly possessed him.

Silence.

So he had gotten here first. There was no way he could miss the singer’s arrival now. He rubbed his head, and looked around the room, relaxed now that he felt assured that he would meet his goal. There were large posters of various singers and actors decorating the walls. Original posters for Broadway musicals lined the bulletin boards and part of the blackboard. The blackboard itself had had a slowly chipping and fading musical scale painted on it what appeared to be several years ago. There were two pianos in here, both covered with dusty velvety cloths.

The pianos intrigued him, and he drew closer to them after staring for some time. He thought, if he played one while he waited, it would help pass the time, and ease the anticipation. He wasn’t sure if he was nervous and afraid, or euphoric and anxious. He wasn’t even entirely sure what was so appealing about this singer other than the fact that he had never laid eyes on the owner of that voice. The voice wasn't the most amazing thing he'd ever heard, though it was fascinating and he was sure it wasn't truly suited to singing the song that had wiped him out the day before. It twisted through his thoughts and he thought surely the person producing it would do something similarly amazing.

At the moment he reached out to take the cover off of the piano, a bell rang, startling him. He looked immediately towards the door. Had the singer come in yet? Would he be here soon? What about the girl? He walked to the doorway again, and looked down a hallway lined with lockers.

The hall was crowded and loud. People shuffled back and forth, others attempted to open lockers. He stopped the in the face of all these bodies rushing at him at once, and flinched as several apparent choir students surged towards him. By the time he opened his eyes again, they had passed, not a single one had hit him, and he was left alone in the doorway. At the end of the hallway he could hear the squeak of a sneaker as some student zipped around a corner in an effort to get to class a little less late.

He slouched over, and slid against the door frame. He had missed the singer for sure that time. Rather disappointed, and now quite frustrated, he trudged again into the band room. The first period class was there and warming up already. He didn’t expect them to notice him, and of course, they didn’t.

He resolved that he would go to lunch today as well, that way he had a chance to talk to that girl again. She had a key, and she could let him in to see this other invisible person. If he could convince her he wasn’t a geeky accident waiting to happen, he might yet be allowed to see the person whose voice had been interesting him so. He had a brief thought that she was doing something with the owner of that voice that she wouldn’t want other people seeing, and tried to think of a subtle way to indicate that he wasn’t some sort of pervert, that he just wanted to talk and that he didn’t-

“Oh, you  _are_  alive. Good job.”

His thoughts were interrupted by someone speaking to him. It was Acne-Face from the other day. Acne-Face was most definitely talking to him, too; standing directly in front of the keyboard, fingers tracing the row of buttons along the top, although looking down at him. He gasped, looked up at Acne-Face, stuttered and attempted conversation, but Acne-Face didn’t look inclined to listen to him.

“They said you were in a pile on the floor. Thought I should see if the janitors took you out with the trash like the last kid. You weren’t in the other room. Looks like you made it. I’d advise staying away from now on, though. He might send me after you.”

Acne-Face suddenly got a far-off dreamy look on his face, mixed with blind determination and a twisted smile. “YES!" he shrieked gleefully to the ceiling. "He’ll send ‘Darkness’ after you! And when I come back with your severed head, it will be me he favors at last! Me! The Darkness!”

Acne-Face (Or “ _Darkness”_ ), suddenly in his own world entirely, turned away, and made his way out of the room, arms raised to the ceiling, talking loudly about delusions of ruling the world with ‘the world’s greatest artist’ at his side. The talking faded as Acne-Face presumably made his way down the hall.

So Acne-Face knew the girl and the singer. Maybe he should try to talk to Acne-Face again? Acne-Face did tell him to stay away from the other two, but where was he going to find Acne-Face reliably? He had a fairly good idea of how to get in contact with the other two. Besides, Acne-Face sort of frightened him. He seemed… unstable. He had come into this life trying to avoid unstable, and was going to avoid it if he had the option.

Right then. Girl. He would talk to the girl. She would be easier to talk to. And when he did, he would be cool, and calm, and demand answers. Yes. Determined, he set to work on playing something on the keyboard. It would keep him sane until it was time to visit the cafeteria again.

When the time finally rolled around, he nearly ran to the cafeteria, abandoning all previous thoughts of remaining calm and collected. He squeezed his way through the door around the lines of people waiting for leftover chicken nuggets, and tore around people to the salad bar. She wasn’t there yet, and he hoped she hadn’t already come and gone. He tried to slow down his breath and look as though he had something to do there while he waited. Finally, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the familiar shade of purple floating through the crowd.

She moved around the last nugget-starved student between them, and stopped when she saw him. Could she really have not expected him to go looking for her again? Did she think Acne-Face would be  _that_  frightening to him?

“ _You_  again. I see you made it off the floor alright.”

After her initial look of surprise, she had taken to calmly making a salad. He wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to her.

“I… I heard that singing,” he started. He thought it best just to get this out as fast as possible before she could interrupt him and get away again. She was already giving him the strange stare again. “And, I know this is going to sound strange,” he began again, “but for reasons that would be really difficult, and impossibly long to explain, I need to see the person who’s been singing. It’s … well, let’s just say it’s important.”

This was the most speaking he’d done in a long time. He’d gotten really terrible at communication lately. He’d been talking to himself for so long he had forgotten how not to sound like a lunatic to others. Judging by her raised eyebrow, he still sounded quite loony.

She tossed a few croutons on her salad and looked up at him as though she had just noticed him. She straightened up, and prepared to leave, apparently not looking to give him an answer of any type. Trying to ignore him, was she? His chest tightened at the thought of her turning around and leaving him to another day of wallowing in all of this. In a moment of uncharacteristic bravery, he reached out and grabbed her arm.

“No, no, please! Please, I need to talk to- or even just see- whoever’s been-“

“He won’t want to meet you, just forget it,” she interrupted, “Whatever reason you could possibly have isn’t good enough; just forget you heard anything.”

She wasn’t exactly cold. But she wasn’t entirely welcoming either. She seemed to have a slight undertone of sympathy in her voice, although it was possible he wished for it so badly that he imagined it. He still hadn’t released her arm, and was determined to try again.

“Please. Let him be the judge of that and just let me see him,” he pleaded.  “I just- I need to know if he’s the same as I am.”

She sighed, and looked down at the salad. She looked at it for what seemed to be forever, before looking back up at him for a moment, and then back at the salad. She clicked her tongue once.

“I’ll tell him to go to class for the rest of today and tomorrow. You find him on your own; I won’t be responsible for any of it.”

With that she easily slipped out of his grasp, and made her way to the door. She never had to steer out of the way of anyone, and made it to the door before what had happened hit him. He finally had his chance to see this person. He would just go out into the hall, and when he saw him he would –

But how would he know when he saw him?  _If_ he saw him?

He ran back to the band room as fast as the traffic in the cafeteria would allow, gathered his things, and sat on the floor near the entrance to the choir room, waiting for classes to change. As soon as they did, he would start scouring the halls for this elusive singer. He took off his glasses, and wiped some non-existent dirt from the lenses with his T-shirt. Replacing them, he gazed up at the ceiling.

It was strange. He was here, in this life, first and foremost to find someone else entirely, yet he had been so consumed with finding this singer he had nearly forgotten that one he had come here for. His hope was that finding this person singing could help him discover the best way to find the one he was really looking for. If he and the voice were both indeed the same kind of invisible, maybe this singer knew something about it that he didn’t. The songs that echoed from that room seemed to fit so well.  _Like he knew_. They seemed to fit a certain someone he knew in his other existences; a someone he was trying to find now.

When he had last died, and saw that person lying there, discarded, he asked to be allowed to try life again, if only to save the soul of that someone who had become important to him. In this new life, he had promised, he would tell that person how important he was as soon as he could, because after two lifetimes, he understood how fragile living was. And that either of them could disappear at any moment.

He had wanted to make sure it was alright to do this. He had no right to make this person’s soul go through life again, he at least needed permission. The people in charge agreed, surprisingly, and gave him a few slight seconds to ask, before he had to decide. Eyes opened. He asked. He got an answer.

_“I just… don’t want to remember all of this shit. If I forget me, but remember good things, like Freezies… and infomercials…then…”_

It had ended there.

They had taken that to mean agreement, and now here he was, and presumably, that one person was here somewhere, too. He had spent several other years looking, and had yet to have any luck here. He was beginning to think that the people in charge of this operation changed their minds at the last minute to see if he would kill himself in frustration. They liked mind games like that up there.

He sighed, and stared at the ceiling a little harder. Just as the patterns were beginning to warp, the bell rang. Funny, he had never seemed to hear these bells before today. He stood up, and looked around eagerly. The purple haired girl emerged from the choir room shortly afterward, and shot him a sideways glance. A half smile crossed her lips.

“Good luck,” she said to no one in particular. He hoped she meant him. “And nice idea, but it won’t be as easy as waiting for him to come out this way. There is another door back there, you know.” She walked away, not so much as giving him a glance to ensure that he had heard her, and continued down the hall. She was joined at the intersection of the hall by a dark skinned girl who seemed terribly excited about something, and they walked off together.

He stood, stunned momentarily, and then began to run down the hall. Traffic and congestion were worse in the main halls, and he had a hard time focusing on anyone. Even when the halls started to thin out, he still couldn’t see anyone, or  _hear_ anyone even remotely like his target. How was he supposed to find this person? He had only heard him  _singing,_ not even speaking. And even if he had heard speaking, how would he have distinguished that voice from all the dozens of others in the hall?

He finally, after a few brief delirious minutes, slumped against some lockers as the halls emptied out, with only two or three people in the hall. This was going to be difficult. He only had the few hours left today, and a few class changes tomorrow to find him, and then he’d have to do back to her and try to convince her to let him in again. He was alone in the hall now. He rubbed his temple a little before trying to regain some hope and commanded himself to think of something.

With no better option, he thought he’d go to all the classrooms and see if he could ‘sense’ anything from the people he was able to see through the windows in the doors. It was a long shot, but it was more productive than attempting to channel him from the choir room. He climbed to the top floor of the building, and planned to start at one end and weave his way down. He looked in every door he could, but had no idea what he was looking for. This was all so pointless…

He had made it back to the first floor when the period ended, and the next bell rang. He looked around desperately, but again the students all looked the same. As he spun around looking for any sign of the singer, his vision blurred the faces around him into one massive blob of bobbing colors. He began to feel dizzy, and put a hand to his head. Slumping over, he was now looking at faces from chest level out of the corner of his eyes. People were getting more and more surreal in appearance, voices were becoming static. He thought he heard a faint humming over the buzz, but couldn’t make out what it was.

He stumbled over sideways, and supported himself against the hallway’s wall. The blurring lessened, and he picked his head up to gaze down the hall over the heads of the students passing him by. At the end of the hall, he could make out a messy mop of black hair, wearing headphones, and generally taking it’s time getting to wherever it was supposed to be. The humming grew louder, and the headphones came closer.  He stared intently. Something about this felt important. His head began hurting again.

The hall was beginning to thin out, after a miniature forever, and the owner of the head phones was starting to come into view.

A tanish-colored skin tone, and a long-sleeved striped shirt. Carrying a sketchbook, several pencils, and a CD player that was turned up just a little too loud. Tall and thin, though shorter than he'd been imagined, and wearing a rather pleased expression. As the congestion thinned further, he began humming a little louder, and by the time the proximity was unbearably close, he was singing.

_“I was born to stare_  
 _At who stares back at me_  
 _…”_

His eyes widened and he stared as the singer came closer. Again, unable to speak, unable to move, and with his head throbbing, he couldn’t form any words. The singer passed and opened his eyes as he did, pleasantly at first, then widening and staring in what looked like surprise. Neither of them said a word, and the singer walked while continuing to make eye contact, the headphones continued to play.

He couldn’t believe it. They were one and same. The singer, and the one he was looking for since he had been reborn, so close to him all this time, were the same. His singer wasn’t so sleep deprived now, and seemed a little less homicidal, but the mannerisms, the looks, the body movements and shape… all the same. Had he even seen recognition in those eyes?

The singing continued, even as its owner broke the eye contact, and it faded off to the end of the hallway, a little louder, yet a little more confused at the same time. As though even the singer felt that the words were somehow appropriate.

_“Take me how I am_  
 _‘cause you know I’ll never change_  
 _I was born to stare_  
 _At who stares back at me…”_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song #1 – My TV and You by VAST  
>  Song#2 – Center of the Sun by Conjure One


	2. Sleep

There’s a name for what happens when you begin saying words and start to hear only the sounds. At some point, mantras become ineffective, the meaning drops out, and you’re left to wonder what it was you were saying all that time.

He didn’t know the name of it, but knew the feeling so well.  How long had he been saying “Have to find him, have to find him, have to find him, havetofindhim…,” before it stopped meaning anything? Before he forgot to go out and ‘find’? It had become such a mantra, such an everyday thing, that he had forgotten why he was looking for whoever it was in the first place.

Johnny.

Nny.

A friend of his in the life before this one, and, oddly enough, his murderer in the one before that. And here he was looking for him – No. Had  _found_  him. He had  _found_  him, and  _seen_  him, nearly exactly as he was before, and he was so, so close.

Had he been recognized? Had Johnny really seen him there, or was he just ‘staring at something that stared back'?  Had Johnny been looking through him at some fascinating spot on the wall all the time? Was Johnny crazy again? The purple-haired girl had said that Johnny wouldn’t want to meet him, wouldn’t want to see him.  If Johnny really was crazy again, who was she that she could get so close to –

Devi.

Devi, too.

He was utterly stunned by the thought of her being here as well. Why was she here? When and how had she died and gotten into this mess? Was she a something happy that Johnny had wanted to remember badly enough that she was dragged into all this too? Then… Acne-Face?

That was… Jimmy? Johnny’s entire fan club, this life and last. Johnny hadn’t liked him at all, if he recalled correctly.  He remembered sitting with Johnny in front of the TV and listening to the reasons Jimmy had deserved to die.  If everyone here existed because Johnny wished them to be, then there was no reason for Jimmy to have come along with Devi.

He shook his head a few times, attempting to clear his thoughts. It was more than a little unlikely that Johnny’s brain was used for the basis of the world. Even so, Johnny’s brain aside, there were so many questions in such a small space. So many questions that grew off one another and spawned even more. The worst part was that none of them could be answered and he was trying so hard to fix that when there were a few more important matters at hand.

Follow him, follow him,  _follow him_. Why the hell was he standing here, just thinking?

He chased after Johnny, assuming he’d just sense the general direction, and hoping that Johnny had found this almost encounter weird enough to go back to the only place he could ever be reliably found. Would he have gone back there so quickly? Should he risk going in after him if he was in there? Would he look like a stalker? Wasn’t he already?

Damn.

The choir room door, and his hand against it. He’d managed to make his way here with no conscious decision. He really needed to start paying attention to where he was going instead of thinking so much.  Since he had run here, he decided to pretend he had ‘sensed’ that Johnny was here. Shoulder against the door, he braced himself to open it. It seemed a little heavier than it should have been.

Voices. Or just one, muttering perhaps.

He managed to nudge the door open, and saw Johnny standing there alone, apparently completely immersed in his head phones, staring at the ceiling, expression blank, almost mumbling lyrics. The lyrics he was almost singing were actually almost understandable from this position at the door and, for a moment, there was this fear to make a sound, fear of ruining Johnny’s peace. For a moment. Then he realized Johnny’s ears probably couldn’t take any more noise if they tried, and he would go fairly unnoticed.

He took a step, and went to call Johnny’s name, and then stopped, still propping the door open with his hip.

Was his name still Johnny? Even if it was, would he still answer to ‘Nny’, or was that a nickname he had assumed in his prior madness? Could he even just be John now? Gah. The sound of the latter possibility was so massively wrong sounding that he hoped Johnny would have assumed another name entirely rather than use ‘John.’

Well, might as well give it a shot.

“Johnny…?”

Nothing. Just breath. He wasn’t sure whose.

Well, that, and the slight buzz of Johnny’s music.

“Nny?”

Still nothing. He wasn’t surprised.

He walked closer, letting the door close behind him, still completely unnoticed.  He drew closer cautiously, still concerned about making any noise. The faint clicks of Johnny’s boots against the floor as he kept time with the music overlapped the breathing and buzzing he was hearing. He still wasn’t sure if it was Johnny’s breath or his own. God, it had to be him… the way he let himself get completely absorbed in the music, the way he…

He reached out for him, his hand within an inch of Johnny’s shoulder.

At that instant, Johnny whirled around, head phones clattering to the floor. He stood there, with Johnny glaring at him, stunned, hand still suspended in the air, reaching. Johnny was almost staring holes through him, and he realized the breathing was his own.

“Nny…”

Johnny narrowed already accusing eyes, as though trying to vaporize the intruder in his world with some grand delusion of laser vision. The glare was so perfectly psychotic, so full of contempt, that he should have been frightened of Johnny, or at the very least intimidated. Quite the opposite, really.

“God, it is you!”

Johnny opened his mouth, presumably to say something, but was cut off from voicing whatever it was as he was smothered in a tight hug.  Johnny’s eyes went wide, his mouth still open from his failed attempt at protest, and simply froze for some time. In the same second that he began to think that Johnny had died of shock, Johnny lashed out at what he must’ve seen as his captor, and jammed a sharp elbow into his ribs, knocking him aside.

“What the hell are you doing!?” Johnny spat the words, and the laser gaze continued.

It was most certainly Johnny. And Johnny had posed an interesting question. He really had never thought this far ahead.  How to explain this, exactly?

“Nny, let me –“

“ _Johnny_ ,” he interrupted. “Only Devi calls me ‘Nny.’ Who the hell are you? Following me all over the place like that… Are you stalking me or something?”

He held up his hands in an attempt to beg Johnny to just stop and listen to him. He already felt hopeless and he had hardly said five words to him. It was still the same. He still had to act as though treading around a wild animal or something radioactive when talking to Johnny. Already he had bent over slightly in an inadvertent attempt to lower himself and seem like less of a complete intrusion. Although, it could well have been the reaction to the jab in the ribs he was attempting to act as though he hadn’t felt.

“I just… I need to ask you something, please. If you’d just listen to me.”

Johnny remained still, and looked at him, waiting, visibly bothered by something, more than likely the person talking to him. Said person took a breath, which he just noticed seemed painfully audible again, looked at Johnny and tried to find the best way to approach the situation. In an insecure moment, he happened to glance down and notice Johnny’s CD player had landed by his feet. He nudged it with his toe in a completely feigned accident.

“I noticed,” he began, as he bent down and retrieved the player, “that you seem to be as … invisible as I am. No one notices you singing in here, just like no one notices my playing.  I- Do you know anything about it? Do you… know why?” Wow, this was sounding totally stupid already.  Maybe Johnny would take pity and find some clever way to murder him with music, thus ending his miserable bout of stupid. He offered the player, hoping it would serve as excuse enough for the distracted sound in his voice.

Johnny’s eyes followed the movements of the hands holding his music, but he didn’t move for a long time. He glanced from hands to eyes, and back to hands. Finally, after several minutes, he reached out took the CD player, finally speaking as he did.

“I don’t know anything about it. It doesn’t concern me who does or doesn’t hear you existing.”

At that moment came the sound of the choir room door slamming against the wall and an excited “GOOOOOD AFTERNOON!” from Acne-Face, who he now believed was almost assuredly Jimmy. He watched as Jimmy began moving about the room, organizing random things and generally making himself busy while delivering a sort of daily report to someone assumed to be Johnny.

“Pushed a couple of seventh graders in the halls today. They deserved it, really. Said a few things I don’t think you would have liked.” Jimmy spoke as though this sort of thought process was not only logical, but incredibly common. He moved some risers across the room, yet still never had cast a glance in the direction of the one he was supposedly talking to. Said person was not amused.

“Jimmy.”

“I wore this shirt today,” Jimmy continued, unfazed, “since it’s Tuesday, and you usually wear these kinds on Tuesdays. I don’t think the boots are quite like yours though, I…” He plugged a few things in, still talking.

“Jimmy.”

“Oh, please, please… It can be Mmy. After all-”

Jimmy finally looked up, mid-sentence, from the little things he had been busy with, rose from his position by the outlets, and noticed for the first time that he wasn’t alone with Johnny in the room. He looked from the new comer to Johnny and back again, obviously confused. His gaze finally stayed on Johnny, silently requesting some sort of explanation.

“I’m trying to have a conversation here," Johnny said. "If you’re going to idolize me, maybe throwing a glance in my direction on occasion wouldn’t hurt.”

Jimmy looked as though he might want to say something in response, perhaps a question, but seemed unable. When his mouth failed, he tried pointing, but failed to convey much more. He finally turned and left, still confused and muttering something about “letting Devi know.”

She was obviously alerted fairly quickly if the clattering sound of a cafeteria tray and the shriek of Jimmy’s name in the hallway was any indication. The door flew open a few seconds later revealing a sorely irritated salad-covered Devi.

“Nny! What is this loser do – Oh. You again. Congratulations.”

Devi made her way into the room, letting the door close, salad trailing behind her. Jimmy managed to shuffle back in after her, opening the door with his shoulder, still on the floor where he had been knocked by the apparent collision, also covered in stray salad parts. He stood up, brushed some bacon bits from his hair and looked at Johnny, who was massaging his temple.

“Come on,” Johnny sighed, rubbing his eye for a moment, “get the salad off the floor and just come in here, all of you.” Johnny opened the door that had proved earlier to be such an obstacle for his new companion, who was now adjusting his glasses, which had fallen slightly in the past few minutes. He jumped slightly, nearly dropping them, when Devi spoke a sharp “Hey!” and motioned him to follow as well.

“Hurry up, you! You were so eager to see him before. No need to be shy now.”

He adjusted his glasses again, though they didn’t need it, and followed the others through the door.

Inside the door proved to be a little less amazing than he had envisioned it to be. There was a small office, which seemed to have been previously occupied by a teacher, but was fairly unfurnished. A larger room that served as a companion classroom connected to the office, and seemed to be where all the singing had occurred.

He watched Johnny hop up onto a desk surrounded by giant speakers and stacks of CDs and sheet music. Devi and Jimmy seemed to have pre-established comfort spots as well, all nestled into the canyon of music. The room looked to be a second home to its occupants; the cushions worn, empty Freezie cups strewn here and there, and random candid Polaroid shots of the small group’s members were paper clipped or messily taped to the little scraps of visible wall left in the space.

He felt so out of place here, so much like he was intruding on something very important that he found himself wishing to be invisible to these three in addition to the rest of the world. He rubbed his arm as he glanced around for a place to sit, and spied a large worn forest green beanbag on a stack of record players that looked reasonably stable. He gingerly let himself sink into it, not completely sure it was reliable. When he was assured it wasn’t going to collapse or implode on him, he let himself apply his full weight and looked back up at the others, hoping to appear relaxed, although he was sure that was far from the case.

“So, I’ve been attempting to get a few little things sorted out on my own, which, thanks to all of you, is becomingly more and more difficult… I thought, then, that we’d all just talk here, since you two seem to know this one already.”

He watched Johnny talk and saw that, contrary to himself, he seemed to be incredibly relaxed. Smiling slightly, he had replaced his headphones, and leaned forward, as if preparing to listen to something very carefully or else teach a group of small children. This had to be some horrible mistake somehow, that he had accidentally wove his way into all of this, and they were wondering why he was intruding on their ritual. He eventually noticed that Johnny was still talking about something, and that he had been staring at a buckle on Johnny’s boot for some time. Just as the traces of Johnny’s words were coming back to him, he was brought back to reality by a sharp interruption.

“Who are you!?” Jimmy had sprung from his chair, apparently unable to wait much longer to question the person who had endangered his ‘Number One Fan’ status. He continued as though he didn’t want answers as much as he wanted to holler the questions at his victim, who hadn’t been paying enough attention to know if the outburst was random or not.

“And what have you been doing, TALKING to him? Devi says you follow him! You think you can stalk him, do you?” Jimmy’s breathing was being forced through his teeth and he had the general appearance of a bothered house cat. The salad bits didn’t help much. His breathing suggested he hadn’t done as much yelling at junior high students as he would’ve liked people to think. “Who are you?!” he demanded again.  Johnny seemed neither annoyed nor offended by the apparent interruption. In fact, he looked rather amused at what the answer to Jimmy’s outburst could possibly be. “WHO?”

“I’m-“

How was that sentence finished? In all his time here, had he never spoken his own name? No one else had either, it seemed, as he had just assumed he would know it when he heard it. Surely, he had thought, he would have just recognized it when it came. What  _was_  the name he had been waiting for the teachers to call?

“Edgar,” said a voice that wasn’t his. His heart skipped a beat and Jimmy and Devi turned abruptly and stared, evidently just as surprised that Johnny had answered instead of the poor overwhelmed guy in the beanbag.

“Nny, do you know him? Why didn’t you tell me? I mean, I thought that…” Devi trailed off; it didn’t seem that it was worth trying to finish that thought, as Johnny didn’t seem to be hearing her.

Johnny just sat, perhaps absorbed in his headphones, perhaps interested in the patterns he was tracing in the grain of the wooden desk. He was still smiling, but seemed utterly tuned out, as though maybe he had thought to name the desk Edgar when he said the name. He stayed that way for sometime before he stopped abruptly and looked at Devi.

“No. I  _don’t_  know him.”

Johnny slid off the desk, and walked over to the beanbag, and, although its occupant attempted to sink into it, leaned in uncomfortably close to the other’s nose. Johnny’s eyes narrowed and then closed in a smile. An indignant squeak from Jimmy behind Johnny was met with a shushing and a look from Devi as Johnny leaned in that much closer, his expression of amusement frighteningly familiar.

“I  _don’t_  know him, and he doesn’t know who he is either, do you, EDGAR?”

Was that really it? Was that his name? He tried to recall it being written on something, anything, but there seemed to be nothing. The farther he looked, the more it felt as though his memories were very hazy, as though everything prior to the moment Johnny had said that name had begun dissolving, and he had begun living at every point since. He had  _had_  a name. He had a name now. He existed. To give a name is to acknowledge, is to give life, is to give power, is to give existence.

His name was Edgar.

“I don’t kn-No. I really don’t remember much about myself, but…” He stopped there. How had he been planning on finishing that sentence? ‘But I know all sorts of things about you! I’m your CHRONO STALKER!’? That would go over well. Johnny didn’t seem willing to let him ponder it.

“But what?” Johnny drove him farther into the chair.

“But I…” He paused, cringing, then he thought of something and his tone changed to something a little more challenging. “I don’t know much about myself, but I think I’d like to know how you do.” He knew in his prior existences he would have regretted sounding even that demanding, but since Jimmy was still in one piece, he assumed Johnny’s indiscriminant homicidal tendencies hadn’t been born again with him. He was more than likely just as easy to annoy, but that didn’t seem to carry a promise of a swift death any longer.

Johnny smiled once more, before stepping back, and releasing a sigh. He took the headphones off, and took a brief glance at Devi and Jimmy, and then focused his attention on the headphones, turning them over and over in his hands.

“I…‘remember,’” he started. “Just like I remembered these two.” He nodded his head slightly in the general direction of the other occupants of the room. “I have memories of you existing before now, but nothing  _about_  you so much. I recall details here and there about these two, but they’re full of holes. Holes and empty spaces and missing pieces and black. Like something doesn’t want me to see those parts.”

He stopped, scratched at something that didn’t exist on his CD player, then continued.

“I remember them, I remember you, I remember ME, but only that we were. We just were. The images are faint if they are at all. Almost like I dreamed it but I’m sure I didn’t. I found these two here when they noticed me, and I remembered that they were, in fact, them. I recognized them, and they could tell I was here. You said something about invisible, right? Don’t worry about that, you get used to it. It even has its advantages.” He looked at the other two for a moment, and they exchanged knowing grins. “So, I’ve answered your question. I want to ask one of you,  _Edgar_.” Johnny put an odd stress on the name, as though trying to taunt its owner with it.

It was still strange to associate those sounds with the face he saw in the mirror every morning. He tried to replay the name over and over in his head while waiting for Johnny to ask whatever it was he needed. Edgar Edgar Ed-gar EDgar EdGAR. When it felt as though he had said ‘Edgar’ in his head far too many times, he looked at Johnny and realized that not only had he been staring at nothing, but that Johnny was waiting for some sort of clearance to ask.

“Um, sorry, I uh- Yeah, go ahead.”

Johnny continued as though no time had passed, still smiling a familiar old smile as he played with the loose pause button on his CD player. “Are you like them?”

“Them?”  He pointed to Jimmy and Devi, hoping to try to determine what he was supposed to be comparing.

“Yes, them. Do you remember just as much nothing as they do?” Johnny evidently found great amusement in that fact that the other two believed that he remembered them with nothing to back it up. The tone is his voice was now challenging his newest follower to claim otherwise, to say he DID remember something, although Johnny didn’t seem to expect him to.

“No… Actually, that’s part of the reason I’m talking to you, I-well the thing is, I remember a whole lot about …  _you_.”

And he  _did_  remember. Perfectly. He remembered movements and gestures and moods and habits and posture and all of him. He remembered the way the person he knew as Johnny had looked lying dead and discarded in front the hastily erected tinfoil gates. No one had wanted anything to do with the empty shell of a man.

Except Edgar.

The body had formerly been his only friend, he had told them. He had been in an unfortunate and impossible to explain situation, and had been warped based on that. He had simply been given a bad hand in life, would it be ok to take him along on the next round of Operation Reincarnation? It was only to assure Johnny’s happiness, he had said. And with Johnny’s mostly interpreted consent, it was done.

Yeah, that had happened. Yeah, that was also a story that had little chance of being believed, even in these circumstances. He would more than likely make an ass out of himself and Johnny would have Jimmy eat him or something. Sadly, that was something that was something all too easily visualized.

“You remember… me?” Johnny’s voice broke into Edgar’s miniature black and white flashback. There was a touch of eagerness in his voice.

“Yes… I remember almost everything about you.” Man, how weird did that sound to everyone else? He thought he’d make an attempt at sounding a little less creepy and made a mention about remembering Jimmy and Devi as well.

“He’s lying,” Jimmy said suddenly. “He found our names in an old yearbook or something. He’s just trying to get you to talk to him. You’re too good for this one, Nny.”

Devi pointed out that they had never bothered to attempt class pictures again after the year they waited in line all day but were never bothered with due to apparent chronic non-existence. Jimmy sneered at her, arms crossed, looking generally disgusted with the world (or maybe just Edgar) by this point. Johnny had tuned them out completely, and was completely focused on Edgar’s alleged memories of him.  He had been so interested that he hadn’t even bothered to yell at Jimmy for using his nickname.

“Prove it. Show me.” Johnny stared at Edgar with intense interest, inching closer with each word.

Edgar had assumed a hunched over position by this point, in an effort to slide away from an ever approaching curious Johnny. He looked down at his hands, as he tried to conjure up the words he wanted.

“How? I mean, I’d be more than glad to tell you what I remember, but, aren’t I making the same claim you are? You knew my name, I knew yours… and even Jimmy and Devi’s, I- I think we’re making equally non-provable claims here.”  He had noticed that it seemed Johnny was just as eager to speak with him as he had been to speak with Johnny. Perhaps they could just accept remembrance on the other’s part, instead of challenging it.

Johnny smiled, amused. “True. Equally crazy we are then. Still, I want to hear about your remembering. Maybe I’ll remember more about myself if I hear it…”

No, no, no. Lord, no. Edgar had a deep fear of how Johnny would end up should be ever find out he was a raving murderer in a past existence. Not only that, but the Johnny he had known wanted it to be forgotten. He would do anything he could to prevent this Johnny from remembering the things that made the other suffer so much. Plus, he had an all too plausible vision of this Johnny remembering that he had wished to forget and deciding to kill Edgar for ever telling him.

“I’ll tell you as much as I can…but, I don’t remember  _everything_.” A lie. One that Johnny accepted eagerly and without question. He pulled a chair out of what seemed to be nowhere, placed the back towards Edgar, and sat resting his head and arms on the top, ready to hear everything right then and there. Jimmy had also taken his seat again, but only because Devi convinced him it would make Johnny happy, before sitting in her own spot - a worn dark orange office chair.

Johnny stared at him, waiting.

Right then, yes. What to tell him? He really hadn’t thought this far ahead. He couldn’t very well spout poems about the way Johnny moved or how his voice sounded (not that he had any of those, of course), but memories like that were strongest, and all he really had. He had forgotten some strange details over a life and a half and retained the essential Johnny-isms that he had for some reason took the time to appreciate. Yes, he certainly still remembered being murdered and being not murdered, that was to be expected, but things like Johnny’s hair color, Johnny’s favorite words… things that were being quickly overwritten by this Johnny (or this ‘Nny’), were now becoming hazy. His memories were a silent black-and-white film and it was getting difficult to see through all the grain caused by the new overlapping information.

He should get this out quick, so they both remember it. Deep breath, Edgar.

“Well, let me see… We were older than this when we met the first time. Twenty something, I would think. You, uh, invited me over to your house, and we talked about humanity and such…watched some television…”

 

A look at Johnny showed he really wasn’t concerned with the story of their lives so much as who he had been. Right then, just talk about Johnny. Not hard.

“And uh, you wore clothes sort of like the ones you have now. You had several striped shirts, and these long pointy boots. I think they might have been your favorites. Your favorite flavor anything was cherry, especially the Freezies from the convenience store downtown.  You were an artist at one point, and loved music…” Suddenly the list was not to tell Johnny who he had been; it was Edgar ensuring that he held onto every bit of these memories, this pattern of a person.

“You were thinner. A lot thinner. I don’t think you ate quite right. You didn’t sleep much either; you had dark circles around your eyes more often than not. You, uh, had a rabbit. Yeah... You met Devi before you met me, and Jimmy sometime after. You would ask me to come over to watch television with you, but you wouldn’t let us watch shows, you had wanted me to see your favorite commercials…” Edgar smiled and laughed weakly at that memory. One of his concerns upon Johnny’s death before had been that he wouldn’t be able to watch television. He had realized that was utterly insane, but had noted that it was a valid concern when one took into account who he was dealing with. It was twisted, but it made him smile.

Johnny had taken to staring at Edgar quizzically, head tilted slightly to one side, and he seemed to be relatively amazed by something, if not everything, that Edgar had said.

“I love commercials.”

Edgar blinked. “Pardon?”

Johnny stood up, looked down at Edgar, who was completely confused, and proclaimed again, “I  _love_ commercials.”

There was still a mutter of “Bullshit” from the back of the room, but aside from this, the other occupants of Johnny’s musical office hadn’t said much. Edgar wasn’t sure if this meant he should keep quiet or not, but he didn’t say anything for a while, just to check.

“Do you… want me to keep going? Or…” Edgar found himself subconsciously lowering himself in front of Johnny when asking questions. Bad habit. He rubbed his arm a few times. That was one, too.

“No. No, actually. Just wait. I’ll hear the rest later. I’ll listen tonight.” Johnny seemed to make a note of that in his mental calendar, put his headphones on, and held his hand out to Edgar, who wasn’t sure if he was being helped off the beanbag, or offered a handshake. He took Johnny’s hand slowly, hoping he would get an indication as to what to do.  Johnny shook his hand enthusiastically, and grinned at him.

“Lovely talking to you and pleased to meet you again, Edgar.  I am still Johnny C. But seeing as we seem to have shared some intimate moments before, you can call me Nny.”

He released Edgar’s hand, turned up his music, and strolled out of the room.

Edgar’s hand burned.

****

When he left the building that day, it was still burning. He walked home, staring at the nothing on his palm, frequently saving himself from smashing into trees and traffic just in time.

He hadn’t seen Johnny again that day, and wondered how he could possibly talk to him ‘tonight’ unless he had planned for Edgar to live at the school. He shrugged it off, and blamed it on Johnny excitement.

Life went on as usual for him, despite burning palm. He ate dinner, he stared at the television, he read a magazine. On his way to put a dish in the sink, he passed a small mirror hanging on the wall in the hallway. He paused to stare at the face that looked back at him. So that face was ‘Edgar,’ huh? He put the dish away and tried to tell himself that he wouldn’t lie in bed and practice his signature that night.

As he reclined against his pillows several hours later, doing the very thing he had swore he wouldn’t, his phone interrupted his mental debate about the amount of curl on the ‘E’ he was making. He picked it up and answered casually, fully prepared to tell the telemarketer on the other line that ‘Edgar or Current Resident’ had died a horrible bloody death and was being shown at Smith’s Funeral Home on Saturday, should the bastard on the other line have any sympathy at all for soliciting him to his doom. Part of Edgar really enjoyed telemarketers.

He heard music coming from the receiver. Had he been called while on hold? Elevator music? No. He pressed it closer to his ear, and heard words.

_“I know it’s late, I shouldn’t call at this hour…”_

**_“_** Hi. It’s tonight. Tell me more now. I’m listening. I hope you don’t mind the song, but it helps me think.”

Edgar sat there stunned for a minute, before he just started talking. Spouting off every tiny thing he could think of, all while that song echoed in the background, whatever it was. He didn’t think about it, and neither did Johnny. Maybe it was therapy for the both of them. Maybe Johnny needed to hear it all as much as Edgar needed to tell it.

When he woke up, the song was still playing. But he couldn’t tell if it was the phone in his hand, or the memory making the melody.

_“Drown out the machinery in my head…”_

His hand still burned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song here is 'Sleep' by Conjure One.


	3. Mad World

Stretch.

Awake again. What time was it? How many times had he woken up this morning?

8:23.

Better yet, what day was it, and did he have school today?

It was sort of funny, most high school students beg for weekends and random days off, while Edgar often hoped for extra days of school and no snow delays.  He found school made him happier than home, although he wasn’t entirely sure why. All to see  _him_? Maybe.  Because life held nothing else of interest to him? Probably. 

Never any definite yes’s or no’s in his life, always somewhere in between.  Edgar was many shades of grey.

He sat up, legs dangling off one side of the bed, and shook his head. The phone was still lying at his side. A cordless, the battery in it was now dead, as he discovered when he tried to turn it on.

Grey.

How many definite blacks and whites did Johnny have?  Memories supplied by another invisible student, who had no clues about his own identity, who had just gotten used to the face in the mirror having a name, and thoughts of Johnny’s own which may feel even less valid than any of the ones Edgar had provided.  Maybe Johnny was all grey too.

Or maybe he didn’t have enough blacks and whites to make his grey yet.

“Let me go and try to make him happy.”

He had asked for that much of the inept soul caretakers in Heaven. Would something…  _definite_  make Johnny happy? A black or a white?

Shook his head again. First thing’s first.

What day is it, seriously?  He was already considerably late if it was a weekday. Hopped off the bed to look for a sign of what yesterday had been. The floor was cold. He fought his way into a clean pair of pants he had thrown on the floor as he realized no one would care if he was late or not. Probably not even his former maniac. He found it sort of sad that he put so much focus on these sorts of –

God, hadn’t he bought a calendar at Christmas time? What fucking day was it? He had. He had bought one. A little Confucius Fortune Cookie Saying-A-Day sort.  Had he used it? Where was it?

Threw his hair to the correct side of his head as he walked into the bathroom, and stepped in front of the mirror. He let his gaze examine all of the reflection, stopping to focus on the eyes behind the glasses.

“Edgar.”

This might take a while. Maybe they’d start calling him ‘Ed’?

Hair organized, and eyes sufficiently stared through and squinted at, he made his way downstairs to the coffee table in the living room where the calendar turned out to be sitting. It  _had_  been used, every day, in fact. He looked at it questioningly for a moment, wondering how long he had been using it mechanically, then shrugged, and tore off the top sheet, which fluttered to the floor.

Saturday. According to the now top sheet, anyway. Squinting, he picked up the little easel the calendar sat in and inspected the page. Underneath the date was the day’s fortune.

“ _Today, your luck will change. Lucky Numbers: 3, 4, 7, 13 and 20_.”

Uh-huh. He set the calendar down, sighed, and knelt to pick up the slip of Friday he had discarded. Taking it in a fist to crumble it, he paused, and took a look at the fortune first.

“ _Keep in touch with old acquaintances. Lucky Numbers:..._ ”

“Oh, hilarious. Why doesn’t it just tell me to ‘share my knowledge of my coworkers’ past lives’ too? ” Not amused, he crumbled the little paper on his way to the kitchen, and threw it in the can under the sink.

So. Saturday. He could… clean today. A quick look around the spotless abode reminded him that  _all_  his free time was spent that way, and there was nothing the house needed less. What he really wanted was to be in school again, talking to Johnny about… whatever. Maybe he would call again? Hell, how had Johnny even found the number to begin with? The phone book would be by last name, and…

Did he have one of those too? What was it? Did Johnny remember that as well? Why hadn’t Johnny told him?

He was really hoping for a call now. Again, there were so many questions that would eat him alive if left until Monday. Maybe some breakfast to think it over? The cupboard still had some Maple Instant Oatmeal if he wasn’t mistaken.

Pour contents into bowl.

Student with memories from other lives. Needs a last name. Highly fascinated by a former maniac. Likes to play keyboard. Wants to make former maniac happy so he won’t become present maniac.

Add milk or water.

Could former maniac’s other friends make former maniac happy?

Mix well.

Student with no last name, memories and former maniac fascination, can play keyboard. Can he and other friends who are fascinated with former maniac make former maniac happy?

Heat for 3-4 minutes.

Could student with maniac fascination, no last name and keyboard ability make former maniac happy before other friends make former maniac happy? Is student now… rivals with friends? Will former maniac’s happiness be found in keyboard? Will friends be jealous? Will former maniac reveal last name? Will former maniac prefer other friends to keyboarder? Will other friends notice that –?

_BEEEEEEP._

Shook his head. Right, oatmeal.

He took the bowl to the table and stared at it for some time. For a moment the lumps looked like Devi and he had to shove his spoon into her eye before she spoke to him. Halfway through, he determined he wasn’t terribly hungry after all, and pushed the bowl aside. Resting his head in his hands, he closed his eyes and reviewed the conversation with Johnny from the night before.

_Bang. Bang. Bang._

There had been some difficulty in telling him anything, as so much of who Johnny had been was murder or insanity centered. Even while half asleep, Edgar was careful. Yes, Nny, you owned a rabbit, no…, no, Edgar couldn’t really recall how it died…

_Bang._

Squeezed his eyes shut tighter. He really didn’t want to be lying to Johnny, but Johnny’s one condition regarding this rebirth had been that he didn’t want to remember any of the horrid things in his prior lives. If Edgar could prevent them from ever surfacing, allowing Johnny to live happily, Edgar would consider himself to have served his purpose.

Died for him. Live for him.

_Ringing. Ringing. Ringing._

If he could just get this ringing out of his head, he could think a little easier-

_Ringing._

-he could-

_Ringing._

That ringing sounded like the phone.

The phone! HIM?

Springing from his place at the table, knocking over the chair he had been sitting in, Edgar clamored across the house for the telephone that hadn’t died in late night memory making.  Finally he reached it after jumping over his old pink recliner, and snatched it off its base.

“Hello?”

“What day is today?” Johnny’s voice inquired.

“Uh…”Edgar blinked. “Saaaaturday…,” he ventured, lengthening the first syllable in thought.

“You know what that means?”

“… No?”

“No?” Johnny sounded genuinely confused. “Then… what are you doing?”

“I was… I was just eating some breakfast. What was I supposed to be doing?”

“Going to school, buying another grey shirt, indulging your fetish for broken headbands, balancing peas on a spoon, opening the door…”

“The door, wha-?” Edgar walked as far to the entry way as the cord on his phone would allow and looked through the window on the door to see a tan-skinned figure on a cell phone standing on his steps waving at him enthusiastically.

Perplexed, Edgar stood frozen for a moment, glancing between the phone and the person at his door before letting the phone go, the cord retracting and the receiver clattering across the floor.  He opened the door, still bewildered.

“’Bout time,” Johnny said cheerfully, still into his phone.

Edgar, still, wasn’t sure what was going on. His eyes followed Johnny’s hands as he started to put the tiny phone into a book bag at his side.

“Where did you…?” Edgar started asking, only to realize that was not the question he really should have been concerned with.

“Oh, this?” Johnny said, holding up the phone. He grinned. “Found it on the sidewalk one day. Seems it belonged to some guy named Chet or something. I like telling all his relatives that he died when they call. It gets really good when all 4 of his girlfriends call, the dumb fuck.”

Giving a nervous smile, Edgar scratched his head and his smile managed to let out a quiet laugh. Part of him was still unwilling to challenge Johnny’s logic or actions. He coughed once, hoping that was sufficient enough to change the subject.

“How did you… find me? I mean, my house, and …,” he looked at the discarded phone that was now emitting a loud dial tone, “… and my number.”

Johnny laughed softly.  “The invisible boy was a good student, and turned in his medical and contact information to the school nurse.” He teasingly poked Edgar’s forehead as he brushed past him into the house.

“Not entirely sure how you managed that, considering you didn’t remember your own name by the time I got to you, but there you were:  _Vargas, Edgar. SCHS Sophomore, Male, D.O.B.: May 5th, Eyes: Brown/Green, Hair: Dark Brown/Black. 509 Linden Drive, Phone: 448-4103,_ ” Johnny recited the information mechanically. Much like the seventh graders Edgar has seen in the halls last week had been chanting the Preamble like glass-eyed zombies.

Johnny continued. “You failed gym every year because they can’t tell you’re there. You did do really well in cooking classes in Junior High somehow though. You-“

“Nny, stop, stop, please, I get it…” He suddenly stopped. “‘ _Vargas_?’  I never would have… When did I fill those things out? Did I forget progressively? Did-?”

“Shut up, please,” Johnny interrupted, “before you hurt yourself.” He had taken Edgar’s distress as a chance to wander over to his couch and flop down on it, assuming the TV position: slouched in the cushions, arms draped lazily over the couch’s back and arms.

“If you think about those things too much, you’ll drive yourself insane. Just go with it.  If you’re remembering things from a life or two ago, I would say not to worry about stuff from junior high. It’ll come back.”  Johnny spoke as though he had quite a lot of experience in this particular field.

The dial tone still hummed over everything. Edgar went to hang the phone up, once again climbing over his old pink chair.  A glance over at Johnny saw him looking curiously at his new surroundings, and then picking up Edgar’s fortune cookie calendar.

“‘Your luck will change’, huh?” Johnny studied the paper, mouthing the numbers to himself.

“Yeah, sounds pretty good, right?” Edgar was thrilled that calendar could offer some sort of conversation starter, since he, as just a  _person_ , was so bad at those. He sat down beside the couch, on the ottoman thing he had found in the basement when he dared venture into it some years ago.

Johnny raised an eyebrow. “If you say so. Sayings like this are a bit like prophecies and oracles. They’re ambiguous. It says your luck will  _change_. Not that it will get better. Your house could burn down, and from your current state, that would be quite the change in luck. If you visit the oracle and she tells you a great force will be destroyed in the coming battle, don’t assume that force is your enemy’s.” Johnny put the calendar down, and Edgar’s momentary jubilation at having something to discuss was shot down by an oracle he hadn’t consulted.

Suddenly, something hit him.

“How did you get into the nurse’s office?”

Johnny looked at him with a bit of surprise, as though this question was not only stupid, but its answer painfully obvious. He fished around in his pocket for a moment, pulled out a few random objects, paper clips, a pocket knife (which made Edgar cringe), some gum wrappers, some scribbled lyrics, and finally, a ring of keys.  He tossed the ring at Edgar, and it clanked into his lap.

Edgar picked them up and examined them. Dozens of keys, all sizes shapes and types. The glint of light on some and the dull lack of sheen on others showed which ones Johnny favored. He shook his head in disbelief and looked back up at Johnny who was sporting an amused grin.

“Nny, where did you…? Are these all for the school?” Part of Edgar wanted to stand up and report this to the principal immediately. The other part of him knew that was moronic.

“Not all from the school, but mostly. I got ‘em from the guy who lives next door to the school. He had piles and piles of keys, wears a lot of them, too. Told me he collects them for security reasons or something. I assumed he was batty, but asked if he had any to the school. He had to unlock about four of the padlocks he was wearing on his person, but he gave me this mess.” Johnny reached over, took the keys back from Edgar and continued. “I’ve figured out a bunch of them, but there’s still so many I haven’t even tried in anything yet. Some of them I added myself, as I saw them useful,” he paused, examining one particularly shiny one. He looked up at Edgar and grinned. “Have an extra house key?”

“And why would I- I mean, what would you- … Yeah, I do,” Edgar finally managed with a sigh. He wasn’t entirely sure where this was going, nor if he should be trusting Johnny with his house key.

“Here,” Johnny said, leaning over the arm of the chair and holding up one bronze colored key, “If it makes you feel any better, this one is Devi’s. And this one…” he pulled out a shiny silver one, “is Jimmy’s. I’ve got space on here for an Edgar, if you’ll give it to me. I can put you beside Devi’s weird friend and the hobo down the street before he became a hobo. Neat, huh?”

Edgar’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

“Sure, me and the hobo, ‘BFF’. I mean, it’s not like- wait, why do you have a hobo’s old house key?”

Johnny just grinned and held up the giant key collection, dangling it by Devi’s key.

“Well?”

Edgar sighed.  “Hang on.”

Edgar actually had about three extra keys. He kept one under a rock outside, of course, just in case, but the other two he had shoved in a drawer. He wasn’t sure why the ‘Operation Reincarnation’ people thought he needed so many, unless they thought his lack of companionship humorous. He took one out of the desk, sighed once, and closed the drawer. He walked back into the living room where Johnny was spinning a few keys around the ring intently. Edgar stood beside him and held out the key.

“Here,” he said quickly, “take it before I question myself to insanity again.”

“Ha, I win,” Johnny laughed as he snatched the key, “I promise I won’t steal all your food in the middle of the night. I also can be fairly sure I won’t blow your house up.”

Edgar resigned himself to sitting on the other side of Johnny on the couch.

“Well, at least I have that. Speaking of house, how do you find your own house key on that thing?” Edgar asked, pointing to Johnny’s massive key ring.

Johnny blinked at him, almost smiling. “I don’t have one,” he said with a tone that sounded more like he thought he was reminding Edgar than telling him something new.

Edgar held his hands up, putting an imaginary halt on the conversation. “Wait, wait, wait. You’ve got the keys to the home of a now HOBO, but you don’t have the key to your own home?”

Johnny shook his head. “No, I have a key to my home… I just don’t have a house.”

Pausing for a moment, mid gesture, Edgar had his hand on his forehead as though trying to pull some comprehension of this conversation out. “Then, wh-“

“Didn’t you know?” Johnny asked honestly. “I live in the choir room at the school. So, I have lots of keys to my  _home_ , just no  _house_. Careful, Edgar, those words aren’t interchangeable.”

Edgar’s eyes widened and he let his hand fall down to his lap. There he was, the soul the Heavenly Morons had sent to make Johnny happy, living in a beautifully comfortable house, and Johnny, the one who needed the happy, was living in a choir room. Suddenly, giving that house key didn’t feel so completely insane.

“I’m sorry,” he started,” I didn’t realize… I mean, when I saw you in there all the time, I thought… I don’t know what I thought, but I apologize.”  He realized it sounded pretty lame, but would rather it be honest than sound pretty.

Johnny looked at him, and tilted his head to one side. “Don’t assume I’m unhappy there, too. You’ve got a bad habit of assuming things. Might want to work on that.”

  
Edgar sighed. Foiled again. He looked at the keys in Johnny’s hands and watched the glint of the light as long, thin fingers absent mindedly fiddled with them. He saw his own house key go whizzing by on the ring as Johnny spun it in his hands.  Before he entirely understood what he was doing, Edgar reached out and grabbed the ring, making Johnny jump at the sudden movement.

He fished through the keys for his own, (right beside the key labeled ‘Hobo Bob’ with a piece of duct tape) and held it up, showing it to Johnny.

“Whenever you want to,” Edgar said firmly, “you can use this. Remember what it looks like, because I don’t care what time of night it is, or what time in the morning; you’re more than welcome here.”

Johnny blinked at the key, then blinked at Edgar. He reached up slowly and took the keys back by Edgar’s key.

“You know,” Johnny began, as he took hold of the small copper key, “you’re the only one who offered me this key willingly, or at least, the way I wanted.  I practically had to wrestle one off of Devi, and Jimmy wouldn’t stop trying to  _make_  me take his. I have Devi’s friend’s key because Devi gave it to me to shut me up the first time. Every time I told Jimmy ‘no’ he tried to sneak one in my bag. I took it eventually, and Devi doesn’t mind me having hers now, but still…”

He trailed off for a moment, and Edgar thought maybe he was going to cry or something. Instead, he grinned.

“Then, I’m taking you up on the offer for the weekend, while they use my bedroom to get ready for Monday’s fundraiser.”

*****

Edgar stood in the kitchen, making omelettes for lunch while Johnny unpacked everything he owned in the living room. How this had happened, exactly, he wasn’t sure. But Edgar had gone from wondering what day it was, to letting a slightly mental reincarnation of a murderer take up residence on his couch.

He finished the eggs, and brought them out to the living room, setting them on the coffee table. Johnny had since made himself at home as evidenced by the contents of his book bag that were spilled across the room. Edgar’s floor was now covered in various papers, CDs, batteries, a sky blue lucky rabbit’s foot, pencils and folders full of doodles. It seemed the bag still contained clothing, and some other bits of general stuff.

“Hey! Omelettes!”

Johnny jumped off the place on the floor where he’d been sitting cross-legged, scribbling in a little book, and grabbed a plate from the coffee table not seconds after Edgar put it down. He was already several bites into it, before Edgar could manage to ask him if he needed anything else.

“Oh,” Johnny said, as though suddenly realizing he was eating, “… do you have any hot sauce?”

Edgar meandered back into his kitchen, and opened the fridge.  Señor Diablo’s Pepper Hot Sauce.  After visiting Heaven, Señor Diablo sort of gave him the chills. Yeah, it was only on some hot sauce but still…the image brought on the thought, brought on the… Gah.  He shrugged, grabbed some random cherry drinks from the lower rack, and went back out to the living room where he could now hear TV noises.

“Your ‘Señor Diablo,’” Edgar muttered, handing Johnny the bottle. Johnny took it without giving Edgar a glance, thoroughly engrossed in the infomercial on the television. Edgar laughed to himself, and took a seat on the other side of the couch.

“What are we watching?” he asked, setting down the cherry drinks.

“QRB,” Johnny said between bites, emphasizing random words with a swing of his fork, “It’s this weird stuff for taking off paint. They even take it off with  _paper_  later. It’s insane. This one’s my favorite infomercial. I was just going to watch the commercials on the cartoon channel, but I like this better.”

Edgar cocked his head to one side, watching the man on the infomercial talk excitedly about getting paint off of ‘this stunning 19th century cabinet set.’ The imagery was pretty strange. The layers and layers of ugly paint just peeled away, to reveal wood that was, of course, beautiful. Somehow the paint remover stuff also polished the wood.

“Fantastic,” the television proclaimed.

While Edgar contemplated some deeper philosophical meaning behind watching this particular infomercial, Johnny started up again.

“I really like when they do half the dresser in the stuff and then leave the other half to – HEY. You brought cherry! I love cherry, this is my favor-”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Oh. Right.”

Johnny paused for a long time, looking at his eggs. He looked up for a moment when the announcer said something to the effect of, “Wouldja lookit that!?” but didn’t say anything.  Finally, just before Edgar was able to act on his impulse to fill the silence…

“Tell me something I don’t know about myself. Tell me something I don’t remember. Tell me something I should know.”  He spoke in the direction of the television, but spoke  _to_  Edgar.

Edgar stopped mid fork-to-mouth movement, and just held the eggs there. After several failed attempts at opening his mouth to speak and not stuff it with omelette, he set the fork down, and stared over the rim of the plate.

“Alright,” he began, trying to collect thoughts, “let me think of what I haven’t already told you…”  He clicked his tongue and tapped in his thigh a few times, trying to come up with something.

“Your neighbor! Did I tell you about Squee?”

“Something about me, Edgar.”

“Right. Ok… Ok, here goes then. I’ll just go with anything here… You loved going to the movies alone, you spent hours up on this big cliff near the city with your car… I think you stared at the stars. Pop-rocks and-”

“CHERRY SODA. Those are  _good fun_.  I once told this little kid it would make his face explode! His friends actually held his mouth open to try to get both the rocks and the drink in there. Can you believe it? All bets off when there’s violence involved. All people seem to be like those kids. Still, it’s fun to experiment with those at the same time… It does neat stuff to your nose…” He stopped, and played with what was left of the egg on his plate, poking at it with a fork. “Am I the same as before?” he asked, letting his fork clink against his plate, and, finally, looking over at Edgar.

“No,” Edgar replied quickly, “There’s something that you’re missing, or maybe it’s gained, that’s quite different from how you were before. Before you… well, you were a little dangerous. I really can’t pinpoint it to much more than that.”

Johnny cracked a smile that frightened Edgar. The familiar look in Johnny’s eyes, younger eyes though they might be, was enough to make him want to crawl away.

“Do you think I’m completely harmless, Edgar? You know, people who are invisible have the potential to get away with so much… Enough attacks by something that seems like it isn’t there is enough to get a woman to refuse to come back to work on claims of ghosts. To refuse to come back to her job at a local high school. To refuse to continue the choir program. To give an invisible boy and his friends a place to live…” Johnny slowed and stopped talking altogether for a while, possibly reflecting on the entire incident, then continued.

“I haven’t done anything like that since, though. When I chased her the first time, things would start talking to me when I would try to sleep at night. Chasing is not so pleasant that I’d want to go through the walls talking to me again.”

The story terrified Edgar more than Johnny would have imagined. It seemed as though Johnny was already on his way to insanity, and if Edgar didn’t stop it, Johnny would relive everything, perhaps right up to killing Edgar. And then injuring Devi, and killing Jimmy. All over again. Edgar had sworn he’d find some way for this to never happen again, and it looked as though he was already behind. Johnny’s little indications in his other life said that he might have gone mad from losing something related to his art. If Edgar could keep that alive somehow…

As if on cue, Johnny, whose attention had been torn from the television burst out loudly with Edgar’s name.

“Gah, what?” Edgar looked around expecting something horrible involving the Hot Sauce to have happened. Instead, Johnny was looking at Edgar’s keyboard.

“Edgar. Edgar, do you play?” Johnny asked, excitement making him twitch a little.

Edgar stood up, swallowed nothing, and nodded.

“Yes…”

Johnny jumped a little, then ran back to the spot on the floor where he had dumped his life. He fished through papers and gadgets, and pulled out some CDs. After checking the track listings on a few, he picked one up, and looked back at Edgar.

“Will you play something for me?” he asked quietly.

“I… yeah, sure…I… what do you… want?”  Something about Johnny was drastically affecting Edgar’s sentence forming abilities.

Johnny grabbed the CD from its case, and clicked it into his CD player. He walked over to Edgar, holding the player as though it contained God. He took the headphones in one hand, and held them to Edgar’s cheek.

“Here,” he urged.

Edgar put the headphones on, and waited. First nothing. Then some beeps as Johnny found the track he wanted Edgar to hear so badly. Finally, he heard the beginning strains of a melancholy piano. And then a voice. He knew this song, actually. It might be difficult to just play it out of nowhere, but he’d try. The singer mentioned dying, and Edgar took the headphones off. Johnny still looked up at him, eyes wide.

“I know that song,” Edgar said slowly. “I might be able to play it for you.”

He sat down, and looked at the keys. It wouldn’t be as nice as Johnny’s CD, as Edgar's keyboard wasn’t the greatest, but he had resolved to do everything he could at this point. He’d do anything he could to keep the only thing that he could tie to Johnny’s sanity a strong force in his existence.

Poking a few keys, Edgar attempted to find the right notes, the right feeling, the right echo effect on his keyboard. When he thought he had it, he started playing. A little shaky at first, but very much the song. Johnny seemed to agree, as soon Edgar heard him humming along.

Not long after, as soon as Edgar’s playing began to falter, Johnny sang the words softly. His eyes were closed every time Edgar shot a glance at him. He seemed to feel strongly for the lyrics…

_"Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow_  
No tomorrow   
No tomorrow   
And I find it kind of funny   
I find it kind of sad   
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had   
I find it hard to tell you   
I find it hard to take   
When people run in circles its a very very   
Mad world"

It was the same look as when he was in his headphones, that same lost look of euphoria. The more Johnny sang, the more Edgar played, and the more Edgar played the more Johnny sang for him. Edgar tried to will the song to go on as long as he could, but it had to go somewhere.  He sat, when the last note sounded, listening the echo, staring at the keys, then up at Johnny.

Johnny opened his eyes a few agonizing seconds later, and stared down at Edgar. He had pulled over the entire old pink recliner sometime during the song and was sitting on the arm.

“Play another one,” he half whispered.

So he played the song from the night before, the song he couldn’t stop hearing in the background of Johnny’s constant requests for more random information. Johnny hummed that one, and after some time, Edgar did too. The vocal had been female, so he supposed Johnny didn’t want to attempt it without Devi, and despite repeats the night before, Edgar didn’t really know the words.

That song ended far too soon as well. Edgar looked up at Johnny the moment it was over, unsure what he wanted from him, but sure it was something none the less. Johnny stepped off the recliner’s arm, boot clicking once on the floor. He ran his fingers across a few buttons on the keyboard, concentrating and focusing on them for a small eternity.

“Edgar,” he said slowly, turning to look him in the eye, “how do you feel about getting noticed?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song is Gary Jules' "Mad World"


	4. Anyplace, Anywhere, Anytime

Edgar just wasn’t the type to get noticed. It was something that he simply did not do. Whether or not he was even  _able_  to be noticed had been frequently called into question.

So, how was he to feel about a proposition involving suddenly having recognition where there had previously been none, regardless of method? About everyone suddenly… seeing him there?

“I-,” he swallowed once. “I’m not sure. It depends, I guess.”

Johnny still fiddled with the buttons on the keyboard in front of Edgar, never actually pushing any, just tracing the shapes. He looked up from the buttons he was concentrating on so intently, perhaps thinking he’d get more out of Edgar from eye contact.

“Oh?” he smiled, tilted his head, “and what does it depend on?”

Edgar watched fingertips adorned with flaking black polish poke randomly at the options on his keyboard. He was unsure if he was concerned about the settings, or just fascinated with the someone poking at them.

“It depends on who’s doing the noticing…,” he answered, still staring at Johnny’s hand.

Thankfully, Johnny didn’t seem to be bothered at all about the hint that he was the only one who need notice Edgar. He simply decided to stop fiddling with the keyboard buttons in favor of collapsing into the pink recliner. A quite visible cloud of dust puffed up around him.

“Who would you want to notice?” he asked, reaching over his head to tangle his fingers in the cord of the phone Edgar had hung up earlier.

“Well… beyond you three… I’d rather no one…,” Edgar said softly, rubbing his forearm to distract him from the growing feeling of uneasiness.

“It’s four, actually,” Johnny corrected, now throwing a piece of wadded up paper he had found in the chair at the ceiling, “Devi’s friend will be able to see you too, when you meet her.”

“Oh… I had forgotten Devi had another friend, that’s right… Still, it’s just this small group, and everyone more or less understands the situation, you know, so I don’t have to worry about -“

“HA!” Johnny caught the paper on its way from the ceiling, and bolted upright, legs still dangling over the chair’s arm. “ _YOU_? Worry? About what?!  _I_  suggested the idea of getting seen, and I’m the one living in a high school choir room!  _You_  have a whole house, Edgar. You’re safe in your little world with your house, and your phones and your keyboard and your ugly pink chair!” Johnny slammed his fist into the back of the chair at his last word, expelling another cloud of dust, which he dispersed with a puff of breath.

“I’m sorry!” Edgar half-yelled. “But what can I do but worry about it? Have you ever seen any indication that I do any  _work_ to afford the chair? Even an ugly pink one? That stuff  _shows up_  here, Nny! In the basement! That chair was the only furniture in the house for a while.” He ran his hand through his hair, and let out a long breath. He wasn’t quite so good at this yelling thing.

“I’m not even sure,” he continued, “exactly, how I ended up here, how I even came to  _be_. Yes, I worry.  With all of our situations, not just mine, we’ll be in danger getting noticed now.  People won’t take kindly to a random teenager living in a house alone, nor part of a high school… Especially part of a high school.  And, really, I don’t want to have to be committed to an asylum over all this.”

Johnny was silent for a minute, as he sat, staring over his knees at the keyboard. “Right, right,” he muttered, “not quite yet.” He sounded almost distant. “Play me something else,” he said suddenly, and most completely non-distantly. “It doesn’t have to be something I know, just play something. You can talk while you play, right?”

Edgar sighed.

“Sure,” he said, shrugging. He turned back into a comfortable position while Nny did the same in the pink chair, flopping into it again. Edgar started tinkering with something simple, something he didn’t have to concentrate on too intensely, since Johnny had indicated that he fully intended to keep up conversation.

Not a few measures later, Johnny started asking questions again.

“So, you’ve got no one, huh?” He had gone back to throwing the paper wad at the ceiling which Edgar had only noticed when the regular clicking sound of it hitting the ceiling began to affect his timing.

“No,” Edgar answered, “It’s been just me for quite a while, as long as I can remember anyway, and even that’s rather limited at this point. After all these memories piled up on me, I don’t remember ever having parents… I know they were there once though.”

The clicking continued, uninterrupted.

“Might be kinda fun if you were a robot, though,” Johnny suggested.

Edgar raised an eyebrow and almost laughed as he played.

“Oh, great fun, I imagine, but I’m positive I had parents. At least in one lifetime. ”

“Damn. How about aliens? Maybe you were a tube baby!”

“Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Edgar laughed lightly.

Johnny let out a slight laugh himself, before falling silent again, save for the click, tap, click of the paper he still hadn’t tired of.  Edgar continued playing; silences were not something he handled well.

“What are we doing here?” Johnny asked, breaking a long silence.

Edgar’s fingers faltered for a note or two before he caught control again.

“'Here'… where?”

“We died. Twice, right? Why are we doing this,  _again_?”

“The first time…,” Edgar paused, reflecting on actual memories of being shredded. “The first time, I died before you, so, if it worked the same way for you as it did for me, I would think that  _you_  would have the memory of why that happened.”

“Which means we’ll never find  _that_  out. Great,” Johnny said bitterly, throwing the paper harder so it smacked against the ceiling enough to add emphasis to his frustration.

“I’m sure we’ll find some sort of explanation,” Edgar offered, trying to concentrate on not revealing anything dangerous and keeping the music moving, regardless of tempo. “Maybe Ji- Devi will know something.”

If Johnny had looked at him funny when Edgar had said ‘Ji-Devi,’ he didn’t make it vocally known.

“And the second time?” Johnny demanded. “Why  _again_?”

Edgar slowed the song.

“I… I asked for this one. Volunteered,” Edgar spoke quietly, almost apologetic.

Johnny sat up sharply, tossing some more dust. “Oh, come on!” he yelled, “What the fuck, Edgar? Didja volunteer the whole fucking planet? That’s bullshit.”

It was getting increasingly harder to play the longer Edgar carried out this conversation.

“No, No, I’m very serious,” he said, hitting each note slowly and deliberately, “They asked if I wanted to go around again, I agreed… you agreed, and we-“

“Wait, wait, wait, you talked to  _me_  too, now? I was okay with this?”

Edgar flinched. Dammit.

“Yes,” he said through his teeth, “Yes, you were.”

Johnny sighed heavily and another cloud of dust told Edgar he had once again sank back into the chair.  Edgar heard another long breath from Johnny before he spoke again.

“Why did you say ‘yes’? Is being dead that bad?” Johnny’s voice was muffled slightly and Edgar guessed he was hanging upside down off of the recliner in some fashion. He hoped the chair was distracting Johnny enough that any holes in Edgar’s story would be ignored, as this conversation was getting dangerous enough without having to concentrate on this playing, too.

“Well,” Edgar said thoughtfully, “I… I wanted to make sure… to try to… help you, I guess.”

“Am I that important?”

Edgar’s hand slipped, slamming into a hideous combination of notes that startled him as much as the question had.  Johnny hadn’t gone without noticing.

“The hell was that?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing!” Edgar lied. “I’m sorry, my hand must’ve slipped.” He fumbled around a bit, losing any ability he had earlier to remain calm in the face of nearly having to let out certain bits of information or else lie his way around them. He rubbed his arm and adjusted his glasses several times, before glancing at the pink recliner.

Johnny was now hanging upside down from one of the chair’s arms, his shoulders and neck against the floorboards, arms sprawled around the chair’s base.

“So?” he asked from the floor.

Edgar blinked.

“So… what?”

Johnny sighed, annoyed.

“So,” he turned himself over, “am I,” took his legs off of the chair, “or  _was_  I,” got comfortable on the floor,” really that important?”

“I… Yes,” Edgar answered, scratching the back of his head, “you were… sort of all I had, you know?”

Johnny narrowed his eyes. “Right. So I suppose you’re doing all this,” he made a sort of circle/collective motion, “for me?”

Edgar swallowed, and looked a little pained.

“Yes?” he answered weakly.

“Oh, how very noble of you,” Johnny said mock dramatically, rolling his eyes, “Tell me, what was it you REALLY wanted?” He lifted himself from the floor, and moved to stare Edgar down at his place on the keyboard bench.

“Nny, I don’t underst –“

“Trying to be some sort of reverse martyr, are you? Trying to save poor little me from – no, not even me, but some guy I _used_  to be, from certain DOOM so you get extra salvation points?! Is THAT it?” Johnny had crawled along the bench, so they were nearly nose to nose now, and Edgar was out of bench to escape on.

“No… no, it’s nothing like that…,” Edgar stammered, closing his eyes in an attempt to flee the close proximity.

“Oh, No? Then maybe you’re another Jimmy? Maybe you want to fuck me so badly that you’ll eventually copy everything I do so you can perhaps get off on SOMETHING?!”

“I… I…”

“OR MAYBE,” Johnny interjected, grabbing Edgar’s shirt collar, “Maybe you’re like Devi? Completely bat shit crazy yourself, but getting close to me so you look SANER?”

Part of Edgar wanted to cry.

The other part wanted to scream in anger. He wasn’t entirely sure which emotion won the battle, but he spoke, hoping one of them would help him.

“Is that how you see them?” Edgar asked quietly, his shoulders and voice shaking slightly (though from built up tears or anger he couldn’t tell). “Is that really what you see?”

“And what are  _you_  seeing when you look at them, hmm?” Johnny tightened his hold on Edgar’s shirt. “In your  _years_  of knowing them, I bet you understand  _completely_ , after all.”

“You used to really like Devi,” Edgar spoke softly due to the trouble he was having breathing with a shirt collar tightening every few seconds. “With the way you two acted, I had thought you still did. And Jimmy,” he coughed, “well, you never really liked him, but he was a simple stalker of yours, I’m not entirely sure where this fucking and getting off comes in… I mean, he was creepy, but…”

“You said yourself,” Johnny corrected, “that I’m not the same as I once was. They aren’t guaranteed the same either, unlike you, Mr. Perfect Memory.”

“Nny, I remember almost nothing about myself! I remember some feelings I had, but not how I looked, where I worked, my parents… almost nothing…” He made eye contact for the first time since Johnny’s screaming began.

“Nothing, really, except,” Edgar continued, taking hold of Johnny’s wrist as it threatened to tighten Johnny’s hold on Edgar’s shirt, “my best friend. I’ll suffer through living and dying as many times as I have to for my best friend.”

Johnny almost snarled at him, but Edgar continued.

“No matter what you say about having not been my best friend, I can’t be wrong. These are the only memories I really have, and I would never miss him once I met him again.”

Johnny opened his mouth to protest, and again he was stopped.

“Say what you will, but there is no mistake, you  _are_  him. He’s you.”

Johnny released Edgar’s shirt, at the same time tearing his wrist from Edgar’s hold. “That’s…! No! People don’t just…  _live_ for other people!  _I_  have no one that important! No one does!”

Edgar’s eyes softened from rather angry and hurt to filled with pity. “I’m sorry for you,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, “that you don’t have someone so important to you. Sometimes,” he smiled weakly, “they’re all you have.”

Johnny had now changed from daring Edgar to prove him wrong to staring at him, confused, still sitting uncomfortably close. He let out a long breath.

“I guess,” Johnny said after one more breath, “regardless of who I am or who I was, if you’re going to look at me as ‘all you have,’ then I’ll wait to pass some judgment on you. I suggest you do the same with me,” he sat back, finally. “Go ahead. Impress me.”

Edgar got a brief mental image of himself as Johnny’s personal dancing circus monkey, as he just wasn’t sure what else he was going to do to ‘impress’ Johnny. He took a few panicked glances around the living room for some sort of inspiration, and noticed that Johnny had arranged his possessions as though he thought he would sleep there.

“Nny… would you… like a room to put all your stuff?”

Edgar took this as an opportunity not only to change the subject, but also to stand up and get his personal space back. “I have two extra rooms upstairs. You can stay in one of those if you want, you know, so your stuff isn’t all over the living room. Unless you want to stay on the couch, I guess…”

Johnny turned and regarded the room, covered in his things.  He shrugged as he looked around. “Doesn’t really matter,” he said, “I’d be fine here. I sleep on chairs or desks usually, so, the couch is great.”

Edgar shook his head as he walked over to the coffee table to retrieve the abandoned omelette plates.

“I’ve got space, and I’d feel awful leaving you on the couch. At least come up and look at it,” Edgar offered. He walked back to the kitchen, and put the used plates in the sink. When Edgar came back into the living room, Johnny was standing at the base of the staircase, arms folded across his chest.

Edgar started heading up the stairs, assuming Johnny wanted to follow, and when he heard footsteps behind his, tread a little less cautiously. He turned to tell Johnny some funny story about a time when he fell down the whole staircase, but somehow Johnny’s expression wasn’t conveying any sort of willingness to listen to idle stories.

They reached the top of the case and Edgar led Johnny off to the left to show him the first extra room. He opened the door and peaked inside first before opening it wide enough for Johnny to see how it looked.

“There’s a desk and a bed in here, but it’s a little smaller than the other room,” Edgar explained. “This one gets the better sun, though, I think.”

When Johnny didn’t say anything, Edgar moved to the next room and motioned Johnny inside. This room was just barely furnished. A bed and a small bookcase sat against one wall, but the room was bare and uninviting without the little rugs, desk and books that made the other room feel homelier.

“I’ll take this one,” Johnny said, before Edgar could explain its lack of furnishings. “I’ll go get my stuff.”

With that, he was half way down the staircase, leaving a confused Edgar standing in the bare room’s doorway. He debated for sometime about going down and helping Johnny haul all his stuff upstairs, but by the time he had resolved to do so, Johnny and the back pack were already on their way back up.

Johnny made his way silently into the room, and started unpacking. The amount of general stuff he had been able to fit in that bag was amazing. He unloaded several books that he put on the shelf, some random trinkets that he set up on top of the bookcase, even a blanket that he tossed in the general direction of the bed. After a few minutes, it almost looked like someone lived there.

Edgar immediately felt bad for not helping at all, and tried to offer some sort of positive comments.

“How did you manage to get all of that in there?”  Not exactly what he had had in mind.

“Practice,” Johnny answered quickly, still fishing through the last dregs of his bag.

Edgar suddenly realized he had been just standing at the door, and thought he’d sit down on the floor with Johnny and his bag. Johnny was throwing random objects out of the depths of the bag, so Edgar retrieved them one by one and set them in nice piles or folded articles of clothing.

“Nny, where do you get your stuff anyway? I mean… I assume you don’t have any money, so…” And yet again, Edgar found himself wanting to punch himself in the face for the completely retarded things he said to Johnny.

“Here and there,” Johnny said shrugging, as though it was a well rehearsed line. “Take stuff from the lost and found, grab things people drop, find a quarter and save it or put in one of those machines at the dollar store. You know, nothing special.”

Edgar stared at the shirt in his hands. He had seen it on Johnny the day before. 

“How did you…,” he started, motioning to the shirt.

“Oh. Well, you do what you can. Grab shirts people throw out of cars, sew random fabric onto them. I have a couple shirts all made from transplanted parts of other shirts. It’s fun to grab stuff from the ‘New To You’ consignment place, too. They don’t notice when some donations go missing.”

Edgar felt disgusted with himself. He had this house thing, with all of this comfort he didn’t really deserve, clothes, food and plenty of space, all sitting here, mostly unused, while Johnny lived out of vending machines and wore stolen or discarded clothing. He thought perhaps there was some sort of karma thing affecting the situation. Edgar had been a good person all around for the most part, and Johnny… well, Johnny hadn’t.  So, Edgar gets a house, and Johnny gets a choir room.  A lifetime ago, that would have been well justified, and completely alright in Edgar’s eyes. Now, however, he cared a great deal about the person who’d been dealt the worse hand. The whole thing made him want to just tear something to piece-

“Hey! What the fuck are you doing to my shirt?!” Johnny snatched the shirt from Edgar’s hands before Edgar had completely processed that Johnny had spoken.  Johnny now sat inspecting the stitches in the sleeve that Edgar had successfully torn from the rest of the shirt. Edgar’s heart sank as Johnny glared at him, holding the shirt protectively.

“Nny, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to tear it! Here, let me go get some thread, we can fix it.” He stood up, hoping Johnny would either acknowledge him or follow, but he did neither; Johnny just sat, clutching the shirt, glaring at Edgar.  Edgar let out a defeated sigh and went back to his room to uncover the sewing kit he’d buried in his ‘Useful Stuff’ trunk.

As he tossed things inside the trunk aside, he glanced at his closet. His eyes went wide for a moment. An idea now working its way into his brain, he ran over to his closet. He threw open the doors, and looked at all the shirts he never wore. All the ones he’d grown out of but had never been able to give away (because just as the ‘New To You’ didn’t notice donations getting stolen, they weren’t incredibly keen on completely anonymous donations either.) All the ones that had come from nowhere and he had deemed just too ugly to be shirts. All the ones he’d just forgotten about. Every one of them could be modified to suit Johnny’s strange taste. He was even more positive that they could alter them all to fit Johnny’s tiny frame.

Edgar picked up all the shirts he could carry, and the sewing kit, which had been on top of his dresser the whole time, kicked the trunk closed, and made his way back to Johnny’s room as quickly as a three-foot stack of clothing blocking his vision would allow. He dropped the pile in front of Johnny, who hadn’t moved from his prior position. Edgar bit his lip, fearing he’d just intruded on Johnny’s dignity. He knelt down beside the pile, and took the sewing kit off the top.

“I found this for you,” he said, shoving the plastic box across the floor where it stopped by Johnny’s toe. “And I thought maybe you’d like a few more to modify… I don’t have a use for the ones I’ve outgrown, but I think you’ll fit in them.” Edgar pulled a few of the smaller shirts out of the stack to demonstrate.

Johnny stared at him quizzically, before looking down at the sewing kit. He regarded it for a moment as though he thought it might introduce itself, then reached down and popped it open. He poked around in the box before his eyes lit up and he selected a spool.

“You have red thread! This will look great on this shirt!” Johnny seemed to forget entirely that he was repairing the shirt because Edgar had ripped it, not that he just wanted to start a sewing project, and immediately searched for a needle to thread. Edgar began to feel better about ripping the shirt in the first place, and started sorting the shirts in the pile beside him into piles based on how useful he thought they’d be to Johnny. Usually black and striped went into the ‘Very Johnny’ pile, while things like random button up shirts went into the ‘Use As Dish Rag’ pile.

None of these shirts had actually been selected by Edgar himself. He had had most of them appear one day in his basement, and had been completely in the dark as to how they got there. He didn’t truly know for sure that the people in charge of his rebirths were sending him useful things, but it was the closest to a logical explanation as he could get, and logical made him a little more comfortable.

As he sat, folding, he began thinking about his past existence with Johnny. There was no way he could have ever done something this close to domestic with him before, nor would Johnny have ever accepted Edgar’s assistance or help with anything.

The whole relationship had been incredibly strange.  It had started when Edgar was so nearly murdered, but was saved when a particularly loud television turned itself on (Johnny must have set the timer) on one of the upper levels.  Johnny had recognized the audio as one of his favorite commercials, then gone to watch, and upon his return began releasing Edgar from the machine.  Careful not to endanger himself further by reminding the maniac of his prior intentions, Edgar had waited until he was freed before asking any questions.  Johnny had shrugged when asked and said that he had passed a room filled with stupid people he had found in a parking lot one day, so he just used one of them when the commercial was over.  They were closer to the room with the wall anyway, he’d said, bored. Then, he'd asked Edgar if he wanted tea.

“Hey!” Johnny’s voice interrupted his thoughts.

Edgar shook his head.

“What?”

“I  _like_  this shirt!” Johnny exclaimed, as though completely surprised by the idea. “I can really have these?” He was holding a red and black striped shirt that Edgar had hardly worn, if ever.  Beside him were a few other striped shirts, even a few of the button ups Edgar was going to throw away.  He assumed Johnny was going to harvest the sleeves for the vertical stripes.

“Yeah,” he answered, “they’re all yours. I have no use for them.”

Edgar’s response was met with the sound of fabric being torn, and the repeated click of a pair of scissors.  No ‘thank you’, but an enthusiasm that Edgar took for gratitude anyway.

After some time Johnny looked up and over the pile of shirts at Edgar. Edgar blinked, and titled his head to one side.

“Do you have a marker?” Johnny asked.

“Permanent?”

“Yeah.”

“Hang on, I’ll go check.”

It took Edgar a while to remember where he’d stashed all the Sharpie-like things he’d found lying around the house. He eventually went back to his ‘Useful Stuff’ trunk; after all, he had to have written those words on the top of it with  _something_.

A few moments of digging uncovered 3 markers. He was positive he had more than that, but brought the ones he had found back to Johnny anyway.

Johnny had put on his headphones and already had most of the new hybrid shirt finished, and had long since fixed the seam on the shirt Edgar tore. The new shirt had the red and black striped sleeves and a grey t-shirt as its base. Johnny happily took the black marker as Edgar offered it and scrawled ‘ninja’ on the shirt. Edgar raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

“I’ve always wanted one that said that. Ninjas are neat.”

Edgar shrugged.

“Whatever makes you happy.”   Saying the words gave Edgar chills. He stared down at his feet. That’s what everything in his existence was about now, wasn’t it? Whatever makes Johnny happy. He lived for whatever Johnny wanted. The idea was almost terrifying. Almost. Beating death twice really does something to a guy’s fear of such a thing.

Happy. Make him happy.

“Hey, tell me if this looks alright.”

Edgar looked up, to see Johnny half out of one shirt and half into another.

“I can never quite tell if I’ve taken them in enough on the sides…,” Johnny explained, tossing the old shirt aside, and burying his head in the new one. He was still too skinny, compared to his past self, but he appeared to be a little less dangerously so.  Johnny managed to fight his way into the shirt, pulled it down over himself, and spread his arms.

“I think you’ve got more fabric on the left side, it’s not a lot though. You should be able to get away with it as is.”  Funny how some modification could turn boring things Edgar owned into something in Johnny’s specific ‘do it yourself’ style. Edgar smiled.

“I like it. It’s you,” he added.

“‘Me’ is ‘You,’ mutilated,” Johnny replied.  Edgar flinched a little on the irony of that statement, and managed a weak laugh. He heard some slight noise in the silence that followed, and noticed Johnny’s headphones lying on the bed, still playing. He had taken them off to try the shirt on. Walking over to the bed, Edgar asked if he could listen to them; he was interested to hear whatever could hold Johnny’s attention.

Johnny gave muffled agreement from somewhere in the shirt he was trying to take off. Edgar put on the headphones, and heard something in… German, he thought. This one sounded a little older, though he really had no idea when he thought it could be from.

_…chkeit_  
Fliegen Motten in das Licht   
Genau wie du und ich   
Wrap your fingers 'round my neck   
You don't speak my dialect   
But our images reflect…

The song changed back and forth from English to German several times, and something about the English made him want to know the German.

_…Gib mir die Hand  
ich bau dir ein Schloss aus Sand   
Irgendwie, irgendwo, irgendwann._  
 _If we belong to each other, we belong_  
Anyplace anywhere anytime…

He looked over at Johnny, who didn’t seem to notice Edgar standing there anymore. He was more absorbed in finding another shirt to splice together.  Edgar just watched him. Make him happy. Make him happy. Make him happy.

_…rück_  
Bits and pieces from your storm   
Rain upon me as they form   
Melt into my skin and I feel warm…

Edgar took the head phones off, and set them back down on the bed.

“Where’d you get that song?” he asked.

“Which one?” Johnny was entirely absorbed in another grey shirt.

“The one with the German bits…it sounded old.”

“Ah, that one. I found it in the choir room. The stacks of music in there are years and years old. I just go through it all, find the stuff I like, and then use the computer lab to burn everything I really like onto other CDs,” Johnny threw some shirts behind him. “That song has a completely German version, too, but I like the one you heard better.”

He sighed, frustrated. “Do you have a solid black one?”

“I think so,” Edgar said. “Let me help you look.”  He shuffled over on his knees and starting tossing shirts.   _Make him happy_.

Some furious digging later and they’d found a long sleeved black shirt. Edgar never thought he looked good in black, so never wore it, though in retrospect, he really shouldn’t have cared. It wasn’t as though anyone would have seen him in it anyhow.

“This is perfect, I don’t even have to add sleeves…,” Johnny said grabbing the shirt and a few safety pins from the sewing kit. He starting pinning something to the front of the shirt, then held it up in front of him, judging it for a moment. He then turned it around and showed it to Edgar.

Johnny had taken a square of a white shirt and drawn some strange symbols on that, then pinned the square on the black shirt. He peeked out from behind it, grinning.

“Not bad, huh?”

“What is it?”

“It’s my name. Hieroglyphs I picked up from the seventh grade history room. I’ve been looking for something to write this on...,” Johnny said, looking again at the pile, already sounding distracted enough to start a new shirt.

_Make him happy_.

“Do you still fit in any of this?” Johnny asked.

“Yeah, a few of them, why?”

“Show me which ones.”

Edgar selected a few from the bottom of the stack; some stripes and t-shirts he had just never bothered to put on, and handed them to Johnny.

“Those ones,” he said. “What do need them for?”

“I’ll make  _you_  one. You can’t be boring forever.”

He’d already been born like that three times, it was starting to look inevitable, but if Johnny was convinced a shirt would make him less boring, Edgar would play along. Make him happy. Because everything was about making him happy.

_…I'm going to any world you're coming from_  
Anyplace anywhere anytime   
  
Gib mir die Hand   
ich bau dir ein Schloss aus Sand   
Irgendwie, irgendwo, irgendwann.   
I'm going to any world you're coming from   
Anyplace anywhere anytime…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song is “Anyplace, Anywhere, Anytime” done by Nena and Kim Wilde, which is the newer, half English version of “Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann.”
> 
> The German included :
> 
> …chkeit   
> Fliegen Motten in das Licht   
> Genau wie du und ich 
> 
> ‘-ness (part of a word there, look it up and listen if you REALLY want to know)  
> Moths fly in the light  
> Just like you and me’
> 
> …Gib mir die Hand   
> ich bau dir ein Schloss aus Sand   
> Irgendwie, irgendwo, irgendwann.
> 
> ‘…give me your hand  
> I’ll build you a lock of (out of) sand  
> Anyhow, anywhere, anytime (anywhen)’
> 
> Of course, you could go look up the lyrics and get the song yourself. *hint hint* The German translating is my own, and is not professional by any means. 
> 
> Also, the calming piano piece Edgar was playing at the beginning doesn’t really exist in the depths of my playlist anywhere, but for the feeling I was going for, VAST’s “Lady of Dreams” is pretty damn good, and what I wrote most of that section to. No vocals in that, or I would have indicated… somehow.


	5. Legion

_“Seems like a better turn out this time.”_

_“Yeah, I think so too. What did you do the first time?”_

_“Once upon a time, they all died. The end.”_

_“No, really, what did you do?”_

_“Oh come on. Don’t you play video games?  They all have a reset button.  You can’t always play it exactly the same afterwards, but reset will always save you, you know, in a tight spot.”_

****

Edgar sat on the floor and watched Johnny tear some shirts apart, and then select some green thread for combining them.  Johnny was surprisingly handy with a needle, far more than Edgar would have expected.

“Stripes or solid?” Johnny was holding up two sleeves, threaded needle between his lips. He looked at Edgar, questioning, but only for a moment, then seemed to deem him unfit to answer. “We’ll do both, then,” he said, taking the needle from his mouth.

At this point, Edgar seriously doubted the ability of this shirt to be even remotely flattering, but said nothing and was determined to let Johnny do whatever he wanted with them/it.

The pair sat in almost silence, save for Johnny’s humming, for quite sometime, as Johnny lost himself in the sewing project.

The silence was broken (and Johnny’s humming interrupted) several minutes later, by a digital beeping rendition of ‘Ride of Valkyries’, which Johnny responded to by pouncing on his bag.  He retrieved the tiny beeping cell phone from the bag’s depths and flipped open the top.

“ _Hey_ -lo?” he chirped, sitting cross legged on the floor.

A female voice screeched from the speaker, and Johnny flinched, but only slightly as he was otherwise occupied with an already wide grin.

“Ooh, Chet’s girlfriend, you say?” he asked sweetly. “That’s really funny, yeah, he never said anything to me…”  Johnny’s voice was completely unaffected by his smile; he sounded entirely innocent on the phone, though his face said otherwise. He and Edgar seemed to have a gift for bullshitting people on telephones. Johnny just bothered girlfriends he didn’t have, while Edgar abused telemarketers.

“Who am  _I?_  I’m the guy Chet’s been sleeping with for three months, the one from the club. Surely he told you? No? Maybe that was one of the other girls then… Are you sure you have the right Chet?”  He paused to allow some space for screaming on the other end.

“You’re ‘ _damn sure_ ’? Oh, so sorry for your luck.” With that, he clicked the phone closed, a satisfied smirk still on his face. He gave a content sigh, as though he’d just finished a full meal, then looked at Edgar.

“I love that phone.”

Edgar laughed. Maybe he should have thought it was wrong to abuse this Chet’s phone (“He’s got so many minutes, Edgar!”), but the fact that three girlfriends call the guy on a regular basis assured Edgar that Chet was a scumbag who deserved every laugh Johnny got at his expense. Besides, it wouldn’t be long before Chet had the phone turned off anyway.

“Do any people you actually know call you on that thing?” Edgar finally asked, wiping his eye.

“Eh, Jimmy calls all the time,” Johnny shrugged, “you know, if he counts for anything.” He continued sewing, and would often stash the needle in his mouth when he needed both hands to look at his project.

Edgar sat now with his legs hugged to his chest, chin resting on his knees.

“Speaking of him,” Edgar started, “that bit about him earlier… with the fucking and all that… does he really…?”

“ _I_  think so,” Johnny mumbled though the pins in his mouth, before taking them out to position the last bit of a sleeve, “the sheer number of attempts to get me to come home with him seems a little less innocent than ‘I bet it gets cold in the school at night.’ And even that’s vaguely sexual, now that I think about it.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“He can like guys if he wants. I’m not his mother, I don’t give a damn.”

“And… you…?”

Johnny blinked. “I what?”

“You don’t like him?”

“I like him well enough,” Johnny explained. “I’m not going to go and have musical sex with him or anything, though.”  Still sewing.

The images conjured by that wording made Edgar incredibly grateful he wasn’t drinking one of the cherry drinks he’d left downstairs.

“I see,” he said, half laughing, “And Devi?”

Johnny nearly gagged on his needle, which had, once again, found a temporary holding place in his mouth as he surveyed his work so far.

“Jimmy and Devi?” he choked.

“No, no. I mean  _you_  and Devi.”

Johnny coughed once, taking the needle in his hand, then quickly finished sewing a sleeve. He ripped the excess thread off with his teeth and tossed the now finished shirt in Edgar’s lap.

“You realize,” Johnny teased, “that I have free reign to randomly discuss  _your_  sexual preferences now, right?”

“Sorry, I’ll drop it,” Edgar replied quickly.

“OH. Shy are we? Ask Johnny about Jimmy, but don’t let him ask Edgar anything in return. Quick, hide under this pile of shirts! Maybe you’re dating Chet now, too?”

Edgar laughed a little, then looked at the shirt in his lap. Mismatched sleeves, thick green stitches. More hieroglyphics on the front.

“I’ve got no interest in Devi,” Johnny continued. “That’s Tenna.”

Edgar looked up from the shirt. “Tenna?”

“Devi’s friend,” Johnny explained, “you know, the one beside the hobo key.”

“Oh, right, right.”

Edgar wondered if he really cared about Johnny’s preferences so much as he was looking for more of the same wisdom about these sorts of things as Johnny had previously shown in relation to the fortune cookie calendar.  Hoping for all the Johnny Brand (™!) insight into the world of sexuality in general, perhaps. It didn’t look like he was going to get it.

“So, I told you all of that, now I want to hear why you’re so interested,” Johnny said through a grin.

“It just seemed like a pretty daring accusation to make, I guess, calling Jimmy gay or… whatever.  Maybe I was just trying to … get your views on such things.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow. “A little worried about something there?” Teasing him again.

“No, no… I’m fine.”

“Great. Glad to see you’re comfortable with being gay, Edgar. Congrats.” Johnny stood up and walked to the door, lingering in the doorway for a moment. “I left my cherry thing downstairs,” he said bluntly, before disappearing through the doorway.

Edgar blinked still holding the shirt.

“Wha – no! I didn’t say that!”

****

_“But how often should you hit reset? Every time things get bad?”_

_“No, you know this stuff, come on. Just when it’s the worst, when you’re the last guy standing, and you can’t do anything else.”_

_“That was you then, wasn’t it? The first time…?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_****_

Edgar sat, still frustrated when Johnny returned with his cherry fix. It wasn’t pleasant having memories of only one person you cared about. How was Edgar supposed to have any sort of sexual preference when finding his best friend was all that had ever been on his mind? He’d been too focused on that to spend any time of any sort of romantic pastime. No one else interested him enough, and there was no reason to be concerned about anyone but Johnny.

Johnny didn’t bother to sit back on the floor when he returned, but just strolled around the room, looking at the walls as though they were decorated with photographs or little keepsake angel statues from the card shop. They weren’t, at all, but Johnny paused and glanced around at each of them, as though paying them some well deserved attention. When he finished the final wall, he glanced down at Edgar who was fidgeting a little in regard to this ‘gay’ issue.

“What?” Johnny asked with a sip through his straw. “Did I haul you out of the closet prematurely or something?”

“No,” Edgar snapped. “It’s just that I don’t have anything to base that on, it’s unfair… I’ve been too busy looking for you.”

“Sounds gay to me,” Johnny half said into his straw, staring at the ceiling fan.

“I’m telling you, that’s not fair.”

“Hey, try on that shirt,” Johnny said suddenly, perhaps resolving to just ignore Edgar’s faulty logic.

“Oh. Yeah… Ok.”  Edgar had almost forgotten about it, and was more than willing to get off this topic of conversation. He struggled out of his shirt, and pulled the ‘new’ one over his head. The sewing was crude (Edgar suspected it was that way on purpose), but it had its charm.

“What do the symbols mean?” he asked, looking himself over.

“Vulture, hand, stool, vulture, mouth.”

“No, I mean, what does it say?”

“’Edgar’,” Johnny shrugged, “what else? It's approximate, of course, because the phonetics of Ancient Egyptian aren't quite the same. ”

“Of course…”

Johnny grinned as he took some time to survey his handiwork in use. “It doesn’t look bad on you, you know?” he observed, chewing on the straw slightly, “It’s not boring at least.”

“I’m not as completely ‘blah’ as you make me sound,” Edgar defended.

“Really?” Johnny fell on his back onto the bed. “And what do you do?”

“The keyboard was interesting, wasn’t it?” Edgar ventured weakly.

“That,” Johnny pointed at nothing, “really impressed me, actually. But what else do you do here? This whole place to yourself and everything…”

Edgar scratched his head, attempting to think of something, anything. There just didn’t seem to be anything that was exciting in his life at all. He read. He ate. He slept. Johnny was all the excitement his life had.

“Nothing, huh? ‘S what I thought.  Let’s find something then,” Johnny announced, sitting up. “If I’m going to be here for the weekend, it’s going to be marginally entertaining.”

“Nny, I’m letting you stay here,” Edgar said sharply. “I’d expect some thanks and not you complaining about entertainment.”

Johnny didn’t seem to hear him, and began testing the bounce-ability of the bed. It evidently didn’t suit whatever taste he was hoping to fill, because he hopped to the floor after just half a bounce and walked out of the room.

Edgar sighed and followed. Johnny had meandered into Edgar’s room, and apparently liked the look of the potential bounce on Edgar’s mattress; Edgar heard a ‘HEY!’ just seconds before the sound of springs being crushed by sudden force. He leaned in the door and saw that Johnny had indeed approved of his mattress. Johnny had taken his boots off before they’d come upstairs, so upon entering the room Edgar was greeted with Johnny’s striped socks bobbing through the air to the tune of his old mattress.

“See?” Johnny said, inches from the ceiling, “Entertainment made easy!”

“Nny! Don’t! You’ll break it!” Edgar shrieked, seeing how hard Johnny was impacting the bed. He held his hands up hoping to prevent a fall of some type.

“It’s quite alright, you only have, what…like, three beds in the house, plus the pink chair,” Johnny said between bounces. “You have backups.”

The sad part was that this logic made sense to Edgar. After all, he hadn’t paid for the bed, so if he and Johnny fell through…

They’d tear their own legs off. Shit.

Just as this realization hit Edgar and he made a motion to stop his friend, Johnny stopped bouncing and fell on his back, letting the last remaining bounce in the bed toss him a few more times. He sighed, satisfied for the moment, took several other breaths, then sat up and looked around the room. There were pictures in this room. Paintings and photographs that Edgar had liked when he found them in the basement had ended up here.

“You don’t have any pictures of yourself in here,” Johnny observed.

“Why would I? I know what I look like. I don’t need a constant reminder.”

“Hmm. I’ll have Devi lend me her Polaroid next time.”

Edgar sighed. “Alright, but – Wait, next time?”

“Of course,” Johnny said. “It’s almost the end of the year; they’ll want my room almost every weekend until June.  They use it as a last minute prep place for band concerts, pep rally preparations, prom bullshit… you know, everything but choir anymore.”

“And Jimmy and Devi…?”

“They have places of their own, I showed you their keys.”

“So you’ll be…”

“With you. Every weekend.”

Edgar felt dizzy.  He’d spent so much time looking, so much time worrying he’d never find Johnny, never be closer than hearing him from the hallway, and suddenly, he would not only spend the entire day with him while at school, but now Johnny was staying with him on weekends.

Johnny squinted at him. “Unless you don’t want me here…?” he offered, raising an eyebrow.

Edgar shook his head a bit too enthusiastically. “No, no! It’s fine! I like having you here!”

“Okay, good. Come with me.”

He took Edgar’s hand, and dragged him from the room.

So dizzy.

****

_“What was it like?”_

_“Black.  Like someone spilled a jar of ink on the world.  Nothing like fa – “_

_“Which one is it?”_

_“What?”_

_“Which one is ‘reset’?”_

_“I trust you, you know, but I’m making sure no one finds it again, so I’m not telling you.”_

_“I wanted to know so we didn’t accidentally…”_

_“No. I know, and that’s enough.”_

_****_

Edgar thought he could die again, but this time, die happy.  He hadn’t had more fun in an evening in any prior lifetime, he was sure of it.  Johnny had showed him the multitudes of things in his house that could be used to cure boredom, aside from the keyboard.

Recliners were good for launching things. Couch pillows were excellent shields. Blenders could make any multitude of disgusting things to drop from windows (or smoothies, which, if you really wanted to, could also be dropped from windows). And cell phones were amazing fun to abuse (only, of course, when they weren’t really yours).

Edgar blinked at the ceiling from his current state on the couch, still half-laughing from the spectacular fall he’d executed in the ‘Floor Is Lava’ game.  Johnny, who was on his pink chair also half-laughing and half-exhausted, had been far too good at jumping from cushion to chair to coffee table and back again, and had ensured Edgar a swift burning ‘death’.  Everything they had done all night was so childish, but it had been a long time since Edgar was a  _true_  child, and he relished it.

“Nny,” Edgar managed after a few deep breaths, “are you hungry at all?”

“Have any Sketti-O’s?” Johnny questioned.

Edgar smiled to himself, closed his eyes. “Yes.”

“You can’t make those in a blender, can you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Damn. Make them anyway?”

“Absolutely.”

Edgar stood up, and walked across the lava/floor to the kitchen. (“You just died about six times over, Edgar! That was  _all_ lava!”) As far as he was concerned, things were perfect. He was happy, Johnny was happy, no one was lost, dead, or badly reincarnated, and he had Sketti-O’s in his cupboard. He wondered, as he opened the can, if the old Johnny would have been this way, had he also been not homicidal. Would he have had so much sharp humor in him? The same artistic tendencies, the same brilliance, the same ideas… Would he have been so…

He resolved not to finish that sentence, and poured the contents of the can into a pot.

Still, he couldn’t help but ponder it. After all that searching, he had expected to find the same old Johnny, and had found him, but somehow that much better. So, the question was, who was it that he was so devoted to now? The maniac? Or the eccentric high school student? Could he really continue to assert that were one in the same?  Johnny had seemed a little bothered by the idea as well.

“EDGAR! YOU DIDN’T TELL ME YOU HAD A STEREO!”

He didn’t have time to reply that, yes, of course he had one, before he heard random music blips as Johnny skipped tracks on the CD he had put in. He listened to a few tracks for perhaps thirty seconds and either became bored or didn’t find anything he wanted right at that moment, because Edgar heard him switch to the radio.

_“- in just seven days or your- “_

_“And that’s all coming up in the next hour, so just sit tight –“_

_“Only yooooooou…-”_

_“CALL RIGHT NOW!”_

_“-I can guarantee_  
 _You won't find nobody else like me-“_

“Fuck, there’s nothing on. I’ll turn it on later…”

Edgar continued stirring the Sketti-O’s as he heard Johnny switch to the television.  He imagined he’d be hearing a good deal of Johnny’s music now that he knew the stereo existed even though he currently favored the television.

The Sketti-O’s finished heating up, and Edgar tossed them in bowls, almost forgetting to grab silverware on his way back to the living room. Johnny was in the pink chair, watching infomercials while hanging upside down. He was completely engrossed in the television until he saw Edgar’s knees instead of the ‘best new cleaning product on the market today.’ He contorted himself back to a reasonable sitting position and accepted the bowl Edgar held out to him.

“Let me know if they’re too cool,” Edgar said, handing them over. “I like to heat them up just enough so that they don’t burn my face off when I try to eat them. Some people like them scalding, though.”

Johnny looked at him funny, and took several bites without a sign of caring about the temperature one way or another.

Edgar took seat on the couch, and glanced around his now disaster of a living room. Usually, seeing it in this state would give him compulsive cleaning urges. Usually. Now, it just made him smile.  He didn’t care if this Johnny wasn’t exactly the person he had started searching for, at this point, he was the Johnny that mattered. This Johnny was all that was good in the old Johnny, just missing a few chunks, and once those came back... This Johnny wasn’t going to kill him for a wrong move, or for offering help. This Johnny really could be the best friend he had twisted the first one into becoming. This Johnny would make his life, and his living room, a little less boring.

This Johnny was…

No, not finishing that again.

He cursed himself a few times. He hadn’t expected this. Never expected to be so intrigued by Johnny, at least not even more than he had been of him last life. There were things about him that just amazed Edgar, and some of them he couldn’t even quite pin down; they just fascinated him. Part of him was a little depressed that the fascination was more than likely in no way mutual, but he dismissed the thought almost as soon as he had it.  They’d had a good time, regardless of Edgar’s fascinating level, he told himself, and they would continue to do so. So there.

Somehow, ‘reasoning’ his brain into submission didn’t help much.

“Are you going to eat yours?”  Johnny’s voice interrupted his inner debates. Edgar looked at his lap, where his pasta had sat untouched for at least one commercial break.

“You don’t need it  _that_  cold, you know.”

Edgar tried to laugh or something, but ended up sort of coughing. He pushed his glasses up, and scratched at something that wasn’t there on the side of his nose. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I was just spacing out, I’ve got it, and I’m fine, yeah.”

Johnny nodded slowly. “ _Riiight_. I’m completely convinced here…”

Edgar stared at the television, eating his dinner purposefully. He had a sudden desire for a sign with ‘LOOK, I’M EATING, NOT THINKING ABOUT YOU’ scrawled across it in neon lettering.

Throughout the rest of the infomercial, Edgar noticed Johnny checking to see if he was in fact eating.  He clearly suspected something, which, Edgar noted, was not entirely without reason. The television was on, and the infomercial played for nearly 20 minutes, but Edgar swore he just heard silence.

“So.”

Edgar looked up from his staring contest with the television. “So… what?”

“I decided you aren’t like Jimmy, although it’s similar, from what I can tell,” Johnny said, “and I can’t say you’re very much like Devi either.  I like you regardless, though. I commend former me for not tossing you in a ditch somewhere.”

“Um… thanks?” Edgar was entirely unsure if this was a compliment.

“So, what I want to know is,” Johnny continued, “am I really so much the person you were looking for? I told you to wait to pass your judgment, so I want to know now; who am I?”

Edgar clinked his fork against the bowl in his lap and bit his lip.

****

_“What are you going to do with it?”_

_“Keep it hard to figure out. Gave one piece to someone else. Hope they take it far away.”_

_“I don’t think it’s getting very far.”_

_“I know. That’s alright for now, I trust that one too.”_

_“You know him?”_

_“So do you. From a long time ago.”_

_“But, is it really ok?”_

_****_

“I can’t quite say yet. You’re him, for sure, but… there are some things you do that he never would have done, because of how miserable he was. Seeing you happy makes  _me_  happy, and hurts in a way too. I searched a long time for you, but I wasn’t completely sure who I was looking for,” Edgar explained. “You move the same, talk the same, have a lot of the same ideas, but… he- you- Your laugh. I think, in the end, the difference is in your laugh… I’m not sure if it’s the tone, or the pitch, or the feeling behind it, but it’s your laugh.”

“Which of us then, is the one you care so much about?” Johnny asked. “If you’re trying to make  _me_  happy, since that seems to be your goal here, in an effort to make up for  _his_  misery, you’re better off dying and trying again. No matter how happy I am, the man you knew won’t be any happier. He’s dead, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Edgar resigned himself to staring at his big toe, or the pillows on the floor. “I don’t think that’s true,” he started, “You’re him, just lacking the memories, and I’ve always believed that those were what really  _made_  a person. I think you’ll remember.  _I_ remember being all three of me…”

“And look at you! You’re a mess. As much as you  _don’t_  make me want to pluck my eyes out with sporks, Edgar, I wouldn’t want to be like you for anything. I want to remember enough to know where these holes are from, to know where I came from, but I don’t want to  _become_  whoever you say I was in addition to who I am now. I don’t want to be a pile of people inside; I’m only me, whoever that ends up being.”

“But, I…,” Edgar sputtered.

“See? It’s not me you’re so interested in. It’s whoever I used to be. You want to see how much I fit into the mold of the guy you remember, or else cram me into it. I’m convenient, maybe? Similar enough to satisfy, perhaps?”

Edgar put his head in his hands, careful not to completely upset the bowl in his lap. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “I’m sorry.  Forget I said anything. Ask me the question again some other day, I might have a better answer then.”

He stood up, returning the bowl to the kitchen. He appeared in the living room again to see Johnny staring at him from the recliner surrounded by a sea of pillows, books and cushions. Edgar closed his eyes, and shook his head. What he needed was to sleep on all this.

“Nny, I think… I think I’m just going to go to bed, if that’s alright with you…”

“Doesn’t bother me, I’ll wait here for you to get up.”

“Alright then, I’ll just – Nny, did you say you’d ‘ _wait here_ ’?”

Johnny nodded.

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to… get some sleep?” Edgar asked, already worried about the answer.

“I don’t like to sleep when I have lots to think about,” Johnny said, stretching. “Sometimes my dreams confuse me into thinking things are real. I can’t tell if I’m remembering things, or if I’m just making them up. Happens when I’m awake occasionally, too. It helps to sing something or write it down, otherwise, I’ll contradict myself from day to day.”

Edgar shivered. That was old Nny talking. Yes, it was this Nny who mattered to him, but because he was not only the old one minus memories, he was the old one minus insane and plus…

…plus…

Once again, not finishing that. Still, it remained; he cared about this Johnny dearly, but had been caught off guard by him. And Johnny, Edgar decided, had wanted to know all about his prior self in hopes of finding inner peace, not wanting to connect everything together like Edgar himself did.

“Okay, well, the blankets are in the closet upstairs, if you need another one. Good night, Nny.”

Johnny blinked, and nodded again.

“Good night.”

****

_“Of course it’s ok. No one is better for this.”_

_“You really trust -?”_

_“Yes, I do.”_

_“Then who was he when I knew him? I mean, I don’t think…”_

_“If I told you, you’d lose faith in me.”_

_“Don’t make me reset you.”_

_“I dare you.”_

_****_

Edgar and sleep never completely met.  They certainly tried to, and Edgar tossed and turned in hopes of being granted some rest, but none came.  In and out of consciousness, he floated on half dreams and barely sung words.

 _"And what will happen?_  
Will I dream?  
I am too scared to close my eyes  
For a second please hold me  
No one can change in me these things that I believe  
But I don't know what happens now  
I am too scared to close my eyes"

He wasn’t sure where they were coming from. Was he dreaming them? Was Johnny blasting them over the house? Had he concocted them from Johnny’s words before bed?

He woke, suddenly startled. He looked around, and for a moment had forgotten he’d been trying to sleep and that he was, in fact, in a bed. There were still faint whispers of the words in the air, and Edgar stepped into the hall to sneak a look at what he was sure was the source.

Down the hall, into the previously empty room. The door was cracked, the song, which was now reduced to soft muttering had, of course, been coming from here. More specifically, it came from the corner, where the bed was crammed against the wall.

_“…will I dream…? ...too scared…eyes…”_

And even  _more_  so, it came from the thin object of Edgar’s fascination, curled in the tiny blanket he’d brought with him, clutching a CD player, finally drifting to sleep to his own voice singing a song that Edgar was sure was intended to keep him awake, or at least, to remind him why he  _wanted_  to be.

And when he was asleep, he was even more…

No. Still no.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Songs here include a snippet of “Follow Me” from Uncle Kracker on the radio, because that song reminds me of SWAN Nny in a horrible twisted sort of way that isn't even related to 90% of the lyrics, but it wasn’t something I thought he would be listening to, despite how much I enjoy it. THUS. The other radio snippets are just crap you’d hear on any radio scan, nothing special or significant.
> 
> Main song, is “Legion” by VNV Nation.


	6. Little Things of Venom

He bolted upright, clenching the quilt around him up to his chest.  His headphones had fallen off, and he…  _HE_  had fallen asleep.  He looked around at his plain surroundings, unsure of where he was. Gradually, as always, it came back to him.

Edgar’s house. 

Right, Edgar had gone to bed. Johnny had stayed up and stared at the colors the television was projecting onto the wall. He always thought if he stared at those long enough… No, never mind that. He’d decided that he’d go back to the room Edgar had given him, and try to enjoy a bed for a while. The CD player would keep him up, would remind him not to sleep.

The house had become cold after a few hours, and his thin black rag of a blanket really hadn’t been enou- There was a quilt in his hands. He didn’t own a quilt. He pulled said quilt closer to his chest, as though trying to shield himself from something in the room. Did Edgar come in here last night? He looked around almost frantically. Fuck, maybe he  _was_  going to be another Jimmy…

_Click._

Johnny’s gaze shot to the other side of the room where the door eased open, and Edgar leaned inside cautiously.

“Oh good,” he said, smiling. “You  _are_ awake.” He shuffled the rest of the way in, and Johnny noticed he was carrying a tray.

“So, I woke up early today,” Edgar said, trying to explain what he was doing holding something so random, “and I found this tray in the basement… for whatever reason. So, I thought, I’d use it for something different. Try to be original with decoration or something. You know, different.  Problem is… I don’t have anything different in here but you.”

Edgar scratched his head. Johnny wasn’t sure he liked where this was going.

“Anyway, I figured it out.  What would you like for breakfast?”

Not  _quite_  where Johnny thought it had been going. He shrugged. “I… I don’t know. Surprise me. I’m not picky.”

Edgar smiled again. It was a weak smile. Johnny suspected ‘woke up early’ meant ‘didn’t get to sleep.’

“Alright then, Nny, I’ll bring you something when I’ve got it. Make- Well,  _keep_  making yourself at home.”

He left, taking his random tray with him.

Breakfast? How long had it been since Johnny’d had actual food and not something from the vending machines in the cafeteria? Or the laundromat? Heh, the laundromat. Johnny loved the laundromat.  They had those great carts to ride in, and dryers he could sneak his clothes into. Jimmy had stolen one of those carts, didn’t he? Something like – Right, breakfast.

Breakfast, and a tray. Was he supposed to sit here and wait for breakfast in bed? Johnny determined this a little too creepy for his tastes, and threw the quilt to the side.

Yeah, the quilt was creepy too.

He slid off the side of the bed, and picked his headphones and CD player off of the floor. The pause button was loose again. He tried to shove it back in place, only to make it worse by smashing it into an unusable position.

“Fuck.”

He sighed and tossed the player on the mattress, currently unwilling to try to fix the button, and looked for something to entertain him while he… waited for the creepy breakfast. Or something.

He thought he’d try to gain some information about Edgar through analysis of his house, and wandered down the hallway to the first room Edgar had offered him. The one he’d rejected immediately as a place to stay. Johnny couldn’t stay in that room; he felt too much of someone else in that room already. It wasn’t Edgar, since he didn’t choose any of the things in his house, but it was someone, and for that reason would be uncomfortable.

Still, while not Edgar, Johnny thought it would be interesting to see who  _was_  in there. He opened the door and surveyed the room for the best place to start. A shelf against the left wall was filled with books. Books were always a good indicator.

Dust. Lots of dust here. Funny, Edgar liked to keep the downstairs so clean, what did he have against this room? The books looked average enough: big thick boring types, a dictionary, an encyclopedia from forever ago, and a volume of National Geographic’s Best Photos. Pretty average. One thick book on the end had nothing written on its spine.

He tilted his head to one side, and took the book from the shelf. It seemed to be caked in more dust than the others. He assumed it must’ve been one of the first to materialize in the house and opened the back, to flip through the pages.

Empty.

Perhaps a journal. He flipped through until about a third of the way from the front, when typing appeared on the pages. If it was typed, it couldn’t be a journal, and if it wasn’t a journal, then Johnny wouldn’t feel bad inspecting it. He had his own log of personal thoughts; he understood the privacy of such a thing.

The type just started. No introduction as to what it was, just notes.

‘Vargas, Edgar. (Second Time) Beta Testing Project.   
Version 2.1.2.   
Extra Notes: Guest) C, Johnny    
Relation to Subject) ‘Best Friend’  
(Notes) Crazy? Second Chance.  
Items Sent: House, Keys(X3), Appliances(detailed in section 2), Clothing(detailed in section 2), pink recliner,   
progress log.  
Will Update as Needed.’

After that was page after page detailing everything in Edgar’s house. Everything. How many bananas they’d sent in March and how many decorative items, descriptions of which included suggested locations for them, had been sent since last August. Johnny found he was thankful that some items he recognized upon description were not where this book said they could be.

He flipped to the end of the typing, which occasionally switched to something vaguely handwritten, and glanced down the page. The location of ‘tray’ was being rewritten as he stared at the page from ‘dining room table’ to ‘kitchen counter.’ A glance upwards along the page and Johnny watched ‘Bisquick’ disappear from the list, while ‘pancakes’ wrote itself on the bottom. 

Was this book simply a list of things  _inside_  the house? He turned back a few pages and saw a separation in the lists. One was the items that had been sent, with several crossed out as Edgar had used them; the other was, just as Johnny had suspected, a list of what general stuff was inside. There were  _moths_  listed. (There are currently ‘moth times three’ in Vargas-land, he noted.)

He had a sudden idea, and flipped to a more recent page, scanning for some familiar letters. On the page, between, ‘ _large key ring (discuss with superiors)_ ’ and ‘ _house key (change of possession)'_  was ‘ _Johnny C (friend)_.’

So, he was an object in the environment they’d created for Edgar, along with his keys. He wondered what about his keys needed ‘discussing’ anywhere, let alone somewhere as presumably busy as Heaven. Everything else he’d brought here with him was listed in close proximity to his name, along with  _‘Cellular Phone (stolen)_.’ Why did these people in Heaven care so much about his stuff? He blinked. It was about this time that he realized that he completely believed Edgar’s story, or, at least, what he’d been given of it. He'd complained enough to Edgar about holes in his memories, but Edgar never seemed to understand Johnny’s need to fill them.  Johnny didn’t want to become his memories, like Edgar seemed content to do, but he wanted to know what they were, why he had forgotten them, and who he’d been.  In short, where he’d come from.

The last page of the type was open again, and Johnny saw that ‘pancakes’ were now considered mobile, as well as ‘tray.’ He wanted to take the book, keep it the other room with him and stash it under the mattress, but he assumed it would be missed for its size on the shelf, so put it back, even attempting to replace the dust, or at least make everything else look consistently dusty in comparison.

He left the room, closing the door behind him, keeping an eye on the stairs for Edgar’s hair to come bobbing into view. When it didn’t show up immediately, Johnny shuffled back into the other room, sat back down on the bed, and tried to fix the pause button on his CD player in order to appear occupied. Even though Edgar apparently never touched the book, Johnny still thought he’d keep the fact that he’d looked at it to himself.

Footsteps, a soft knock, and the door eased open.

“Pancakes alright?” Edgar's voice called before he came fully into view. He still looked so tired.

“Sure.” Johnny shrugged. He found it somewhat amusing that Edgar would ask if they were alright  _after_  making them, as though he thought Johnny might say no and send him downstairs to make waffles instead.

Edgar took a plate off the tray and handed the rest of the tray to Johnny. Edgar had been awake enough to make food for himself as well, apparently. Edgar sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, saying nothing.  He looked like he was going to fall asleep into his breakfast.

Johnny moved to sit on the floor beside him, for practical syrup-sharing reasons. He doused his own breakfast in an obscene amount of syrup then offered the bottle to Edgar who took it with one hand and covered a yawn with the other.

“So, were you up plowing the farm all night or something?” Johnny asked.

Edgar shook himself out of his half stupor, and looked at Johnny in what appeared to be immense concentration.

“No…,” he said finally, “I just couldn’t sleep very well. I’d be in bed now, but I don’t want to mess with the biological clock and such. So I’ll just wait till this evening. It will be fine.”

“When did you come in here?”

Edgar looked at Johnny, shocked and confused, as though he thought his presence in the room last night had been a closely guarded secret. Here was Johnny’s proof that tired often breeds stupid.

“You came in here,” Johnny said, as though explaining to a small child, “sometime last night, and gave me that quilt.”

“It was late… still dark out. You looked cold, so…”

“Fine, but what were you doing in here… looking at me?” Any appetite Johnny had was having trouble staying with him.

Edgar was now looking into his pancakes for the answers to these questions, and spoke said answers right back into them. “You were singing again. Sort of.  I… I don’t know, I was drawn to it, I guess. I came in, saw you mumbling to yourself, then saw that you needed a quilt. I didn’t just walk in here to watch you sleep. Have a little more faith in me than that.”

Johnny gave him no answer, and decided to eat his pancakes before Edgar said anything else that would have driven his appetite away again. He stole a few glances at Edgar’s plate now and then as he ate, to ensure he hadn’t collapsed in his food. Edgar was eating slowly, but he was eating. He stopped after his fourth bite, well after Johnny had finished most of his plate.

“Are they okay?” he asked. Again with stupid and tired.

“Edgar. I’ve  _eaten_  most of them. If I didn’t like them, I would have thrown them up on you already.”

“That’s comforting. How very kind of you.”

“You really should be in bed, you know.”

No answer.

Several minutes later, Johnny sighed and moved the now empty tray from his lap. There was absolutely no way he was going to listen to Edgar be mellow all day. Edgar was either going to be forced back to bed, or Johnny was going to find something to wake him up with. He assumed he wouldn’t find things like sporks and water balloons, which was sort of sad; every home needed a spork. But still, there had to be something.

A baseball bat? No, that was a little  _too_  violent. He’d learned that when he’d hit Jimmy with one last summer. Jimmy was out for hours. Johnny and Devi had to drag him from the road and into an adjacent parking lot. Invisible or not, they were fairly sure he could be hit by a car, and they didn’t hate him enough to test the theory. They’d found Jimmy’s trailer that way, so, in retrospect, it had been good that Johnny knocked him out, but Edgar was not in need of a trailer nor a cavernous head wound, so there would be no bat.

Damn.

“Edgar, you don’t have any water guns, do you?”

“No…”

Johnny looked at Edgar’s plate. It hadn’t been touched since Edgar had asked if breakfast was edible. Johnny took it off of his lap and set it on the tray.

“Edgar. Seriously. Bed.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine! You don’t like sleeping, you can understand, right?”

“I don’t like to. Doesn’t mean I  _don’t_. You won’t ever see me looking like the walking dead. Get to bed before I knock you out and drag you there.”

For some reason, Edgar smiled. The Jimmy similarities were really starting to show through, now. Johnny slid away from him enough that if Edgar made some sort of lunge, Johnny would have space to run.  However, Edgar didn’t move, or lunge; only looked at Johnny, still smiling. Upon closer look, the smile wasn’t excited about being dragged anywhere with Johnny. Instead, it made Edgar look like he was remembering something that managed to be painful and pleasant at the same time. What ever the memory was, it must’ve involved Johnny.

“…What?” Johnny asked.

Edgar shook his head, still smiling.

“It’s nothing,” he said softly. “Just another hint of you from before.”

“You look at me like I hit you, and it made you happy. Are you  _sure_  you’re not an alien?”

“Yes.” A quiet laugh.

“I’ll get back to bed now, sorry,” Edgar said, getting to his feet. He walked a little unsteadily to the door, and caught himself on the doorframe as he passed through it. Johnny wasn’t sure if he felt bad for him, or if he still felt like he was the focus of all Edgar’s fantasies. He felt his hand brush against the quilt.

“Edgar.”

Edgar turned and looked back at Johnny, who gathered the quilt, and threw it at him.

“Don’t get cold.”

****

_“Why the trust? Aren’t you worried about desires for power and-”_

_“No, this one understands.  I’m sure of it.”_

_“Still wish you’d tell me who it is.”_

_“I’m not so eager for you to run screaming from the house…”_

_“The thing about resetting you earlier? I wasn’t joking.”_

_“Ha. You won’t. You’ve always been a pushover, amigo.”_

_****_

And the house was quiet again.

Johnny wanted to do some more exploring in the vein of the book from earlier, but hoped to find information other than a list of all the grains of salt in Edgar’s kitchen.

Back to the furnished room again. Maybe Johnny would raid the desk.

He pulled the drawers out entirely, and tossed papers around, trying to find something as equally suspicious as a nameless book, but there was nothing of the sort. The only things that held Johnny’s attention for any length of time were the few sheets of paper with ‘Edgar’ written in various styles of cursive script all over them.  Edgar had mentioned these on the phone the other night, that he had wanted to put some of ‘his name’ away. He had been fairly tired at that point, and Johnny had assumed he was just talking randomly. No, no he hadn’t been; he’d stashed his name in this desk.

Johnny sighed, and regarded the mess around him. He’d pick it up later; Edgar would be asleep for a while. There was nothing else in the room that would give Johnny more of what he wanted. He left the room, and stood in the hall, thinking. He could go into Edgar’s room, and look at things in there, but that would mean being just as creepy as Edgar had been.

That didn’t leave much to examine. He and Edgar had trashed the living room playing ‘The Floor is Lava,’ and nothing had struck him as odd down there. The dining room area had fallen victim to the same, and the kitchen was simply full of food, nothing exciting there. There had been a door that led to the back porch, which Johnny had tried to convince Edgar to jump from, and a small storage area. The only other door led to –

The basement.

As he slid down the railing on the stairs, he reflected on how completely obvious this was. He felt completely stupid to have not looked at the basement, or even not have given it a first thought.

The kitchen wasn’t well lit, probably due to Edgar keeping the curtains closed on the window above the sink, that, and the light bulb had had a small accident in a bit of a fight over the blender the other night. The door was tucked in the corner. Johnny tugged on the door a few times, and it popped open, throwing him off balance for a moment. He peeked inside. The stairs down were old and crooked, and as he proceeded down, made an unsettling creak no matter how little weight was applied to them.

What would be down here? Would new items to add to Edgar’s house make some sort of magical poof and appear with glitter and pink smoke, or would they be beamed down from the mother ship through a portal in the ceiling?  He couldn’t help but hope for the mother ship, but was sure he was going to get something closer to smoke and glitter.

No lighting down here either. A sliver of faded light managed to struggle through a yellowed and cracked old window to illuminate enough rough shapes that Johnny wasn’t crashing into things. He could make out vague shapes, and was able to see boxes and general piles of stuff once his eyes adjusted.

There were two sides to the basement, one on either side of the staircase. The left appeared to be storage, and the right contained a washer and dryer, and he saw, when he leaned in a little more, a shower. He couldn’t help but laugh at how easily he could get free laundry out of Edgar now instead of having to steal quarters, or cram his clothes in someone else’s washer at the laundromat.

Above the dryer, thankfully, was a string to pull for light. Miraculously, it worked, and Johnny could see into the right side of the basement enough to look for a light on that side as well. Even with just the light from the other side, he could read the labels on the boxes. Each one had a date, and general contents listed on the outside. One read ‘clothes – may 7th’, another ‘dishes – august 15th.’ One box was sitting open in the middle of the floor, and directly above it, the string for the light.

He tugged on the string as he peered into the box, and when the light came on, he was at first unable to see any sort of logical connection among the contents. Clothing, some random types of food, some CDs, and a few packs of batteries were just the top layer of the box.  Examining the clothes, he found them all to be shirts and pants that Edgar would never fit into, but were perfectly tailored to his own frame. The food was ingredients for tacos and various cherry flavored snacks and drinks. Even the CDs were all full albums of artists Johnny loved, but only had been able to find single songs from.

The box was dated yesterday.

The contents were all written on the side, instead of the generic listing on the others. The pancake mix and the tray had been in here. Along with…

Prompted by the box’s label, he took everything in the top layer out. Just as the label promised, there were boots, a blanket that wasn’t made from old shirts, art supplies and spools of thread.  He couldn’t tell if he felt sick, overjoyed or insulted. Perhaps a combination of everything.  Maybe it was the mildew.

Now came the dilemma of what to do with this stuff.  He could take it all, and explain why he’d been snooping around Edgar’s house, or, as he was just as tempted to do, he could refuse it all, burn it, or throw it on the highway. The thought that some people he didn’t know, especially some Heavenly bastards, thought that he needed some assistance angered him, despite how much he really wanted everything in that box.

“Goddammit.”

Why were they catering to him as well as Edgar? Johnny didn’t live here, didn’t ever intend to.  He was staying while they stashed prizes and over-priced merchandise in his choir room. He’d be going home this evening. Yes, he’d be back on Friday, but that was still no reason to be filling boxes of stuff for him and sending them to Edgar. He hadn’t been the nice boy that Heaven loved so much. It was Edgar they were supposed to be providing for, not Johnny.

Another thought. One that disgusted him just as much as someone sending these directly to him. They might have been sent as things for Edgar to give to Johnny. Things Edgar could use to make Johnny happy.  Would Edgar pretend he had gotten these things himself? He would refuse it all in that case as well.

Well, except maybe the boots. The boots were sort of neat. Really neat. Damn more than neat.

Fuck.

Going through the items, it was hard not to want to take just one or two of the shirts. Edgar would never know the difference. Johnny was used to having nothing but his invisible friends, and wanted no part of this wanting and needing that had manifested itself in the form of this box. There were even more socks in the box! Socks. The socks were neat, too.

He slammed his fist into the box, mangling the cardboard. He was simply frustrated now. Facing away from the box, he sat on the floor, arms resting on his knees. He ran his hand through his hair once, and took a look around the basement. It looked less ominous with the light on. The boxes were stacked to the ceiling, and all were labeled. Were they all still full? Maybe Edgar used the old boxes to store things he didn’t use? How often did he get them? If Johnny sat here wishing for a light bulb long enough, would one appear to light up the kitchen so they could stop using the flashlight?

“They should just send him memories in a box and make both our lives simpler.”

Talking to himself. Or to the boxes.

Hand through his hair again. Something here was a little more complicated than two teenagers with vague impressions of existing before. He wasn’t sure what, but it was there. There was something… something in addition to the people who’d sent them here, he was positive. As far as these people were concerned, Edgar was the center of the universe, and Johnny just another character in his story.  They might as well have written ‘ _Johnny C. (sidekick)_ ’ in that little book.

*****

_“Fine, fine. Still, why this particular one? Why give it to him?”_

_“They had me bring him here in the first place.”_

_“‘Here’?”_

_“You know, here. Life or whatever.”_

_“Since when have you ever listened to them?”_

_“Since they started asking nicely.”_

_“And why did they want him? You say I wouldn’t trust him, he doesn’t sound like someone they’d…I dunno…”_

_“A ‘special request.’”_

  
*****

He sat in the pink recliner for hours, the stereo on loud enough that he could hear it, but soft enough that certain sleeping people up stairs wouldn’t be affected.  He turned the television on, but watched the colors on the wall instead of the images. It was on mute to allow for the music. Floor still a mess, still a pathway of cushions and books from the living room to the kitchen.

 _"Out on the scene today_  
 _Blasted in every way_  
Got you  
Caught on the other side  
Some things you just can’t hide  
Feel the poison of change in me  
All that I’ll ever be  
Comes back  
Crushing on into me  
 _Here it comes again…_ "

A noise from upstairs snapped Johnny out of his television color trance. He stared at the stairs, and just waited for the noisemaker to appear.  Any energy or spunk he’d had before he’d forced Edgar to sleep was gone, replaced with a strange unsettled feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

Edgar did indeed appear quite relaxed when he eventually descended the stairs.  He stretched on his way down, and stepped over a few pillows to collapse on the couch.

“Thanks for talking me into that,” he said, cheerfully. “It made an amazing difference!”

Johnny wasn’t answering. He sat with his knees hugged to his chin, focusing on his toes, noticing the holes that were starting to form in his socks. For a moment, he curled his toes under, so Edgar wouldn’t notice and he wouldn’t have to deal with Edgar giving socks already. He wasn’t like Hobo Bob; he didn’t need gifts and handouts.  He wasn’t some urchin on the street, he had everything under control. Dammit those boots were neat.

“Is something wrong?” Edgar sounded concerned.  Concern. Concern for whom? For the ‘poor kid’? For the Johnny he evidently had been once? One of those. Not for him, specifically, but for the categories of people that Edgar had filed into the ‘People to be Pitied’ folder in his head.  The people he would make happy only for more gain on his part. Fuck.

“Nny? Are you okay?”

 _"With every step it takes_  
Something inside me breaks  
Hang myself by a rope of words  
Whether or not it hurts  
Got to  
Save you from all of your  
Demons that had to score  
Every trick that you’ve pulled before  
Here it comes again…"

“Where does the stuff in this place come from?”

Edgar blinked, and looked a little confused. “I told you, it just shows up here, in the basement…”

“And what is all this stuff supposed to be for?”

“Making my house… a house, I guess.  It’s just supposed to help me out,” Edgar said with a slight shrug.

“Help you with what, exactly?” Johnny continued to stare at his toes, which he curled and uncurled every so often.

“With… living?”

“You aren’t sure?” Johnny looked at him, eyes narrow, a partial accusing smile on his face.

“I don’t understand what you’re looking for, Nny! They send me a chair, I take the chair; I don’t look for a deeper cosmic meaning behind it. If I can’t fit something in, or decide I don’t like it, I just leave it down there.”

“Things for  _me_  will help you live, then?”

“Things for… you?”

“Yes, you know, the shirts, the CDs, the cherry food. The box, with the things for me. The one you took the tray from this morning. Or hadn’t you noticed that that box had some strange things in it?  Do you talk to someone up there? Do they think I need help?” Johnny slid off the chair and stood in front of Edgar, staring down at him. “Do  _you_?” Johnny demanded, glaring.

“No! You’re doing better living in the school that I would ever be living on my own! I’d never…!”

“Why is it there?” Johnny growled.

Edgar made an almost fist, and bit his lip. Hard.

 _"One of my feelings took a ride today  
Into a black box and it came out grey_ "

“ _Why_?”

Still silence from Edgar. Johnny wanted to hit him.

“Dammit,  _WHY_?!”

Edgar grabbed Johnny’s wrist before it decided to assist Johnny’s fist in knocking him out.

“BECAUSE,” Edgar said forcefully. “I essentially asked for it.”

Johnny looked as though he may bite him. “You - !”

“No! Listen to me!” Edgar now held both Johnny’s wrists tightly.

“When I was first up there,” Edgar began, “I was going to be completely content just sitting, blissing eternity away. It was going to be boring, and I was going to deal with it. Then the issue with you came up. You weren’t moving, and thus weren’t supposed to be there at all. They were saying something about sending you to someone for … something involving Hell and various other unpleasant things.”

He adjusted his grip as Johnny fought against it.

“I wanted you to get the chance to go somewhere else," Edgar continued. "I volunteered to go through again, if I could take you with me. I would find you again, and  _make you happy_. Make you happy. That’s it. That’s all. I exist to make you happy. They let me do it again, because I wasn’t doing it for fear of being bored until the end of time, I was doing it to fix what had happened to you. The things in the box for you must’ve been sent when they realized you’d come here.  If it would help me make you happy, they’d give me things they saw you as needing. Okay? That’s all. I’m not trying to rob you of any dignity, of any pride, I’m just trying to make you happy.”

He sighed, and the grip loosened.

“And they’re trying to help me… that’s all.”

Johnny looked at the floor. “…t me.” His voice was muffled.

“Pardon?”

Johnny looked up at him. Wanted him to understand this, and wanted him to understand it well. “That’s not me.”

“Nny-”

“The person you want to be happy is dead. Dead, god dammit! I’m not him! I’m some regurgitated version of him, but I’m not him! The person you want to be so HAPPY? He isn’t ME!”  He began struggling against Edgar’s hold again. Had to just get away from this. Just tear himself away from all this insanity.

Edgar tightened his grip again, and twisted.

“Ah! Stop it, god damn you! You’re twisting it off!”

“Listen to me then!” Edgar hissed through his teeth, “I’m can’t be sure who you are in relation to who he was. I believe you two to be one in the same, but it doesn’t matter to me! It really is  _you_  I want happy! You- You’re… you’re just…”

He looked like he had a word stuck in his throat, and his grip faltered a little. It was back full strength as soon as Johnny attempted to run again, along with the determined look on Edgar’s face.

“I’m not trying to insult you,” Edgar managed to say calmly. “I honestly just want  _your_  happiness. I didn’t give you those things because I thought you would… well, do this.  I think, in some ways, we’re both right. We are the same people, but living in situations that shape us differently the next time around, which, in a paradox kind of way, makes us the same and different at the same time.”

 _"We’re heading for a fall_  
Set your mind at ease  
Won’t you save us from…"  


This  _sounded_  intelligent. Johnny let himself relax.  He still rather wanted to tear Edgar’s throat apart. He needed something to… calm him… to… damn it.

“Can I still have the boots?” he asked the floor.

  
"… _These little things?_ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song is “Little Things of Venom” by Arid. It’s a song I love dearly, having heard it first in Las Vegas, and for the fact that it frightens my step-brother.


	7. Error in the System

He sat on the floor in the basement, box in front of him, empty, its contents scattered around.

_“Can I still have the boots?”_

_“Please.”_ With a smile _. “Take everything you want.”_

He wanted it  _all._ The boots were NICE. They fit, they were shiny, they were great. And once he settled on taking those, he thought he’d take just one more thing. And then one more after that, and just one more to make it even… Soon the box was empty and what had been his stack of things he wanted to keep was a now a mess on the floor.

So Johnny sat. Staring at the everything in the basement. He really didn’t want to go back upstairs, didn’t want to show that he did, in fact, take everything. Didn’t want to show that he really needed it. Didn’t want to look weak, and even though he kept trying to convince himself that it was Edgar who was weak, he still felt more so for accepting all the things around him.

The stairs creaked above him. Edgar coming to see what Johnny had selected.

“What did you decide on?”

Johnny looked up at him, stared at him from the middle of the mess.

“All of it, I guess,” Johnny said bitterly.

“Are you going to take it all back to the school with you?” Edgar asked, kneeling to fold the shirts that Johnny had thrown randomly across the room. “I don’t think they’ll fit in your bag…”

“Trying to convince me  _not_  to take it now?”

“No, not at all. I was thinking, if you didn’t have space for it at home, then you could leave it here, you know, in the room upstairs. If you’re going to be here every weekend, there’s no need to bring that giant bag with you every time. You’d have everything here.”

Once again, this sounded intelligent, logical and perfectly reasonable. And again, Johnny wanted to fight it in some way, but there was no fight left in him for this topic.

“Okay.”

Edgar smiled. It was a real smile this time, not one of those dead tired smiles he’d had when he first woke up. Not a pained smile. Just an honest smile. He’d already finished folding most of the shirts before he spoke again.

“Want to help me carry all this upstairs?”  Edgar was trying extremely hard to avoid a repeat of the screaming from earlier; Johnny could hear it in his tone. This may have been cowardice, this may have been intelligence, this may have been him making Johnny ‘happy.’ 

Johnny nodded silently in agreement, unfolded his legs from the tangled sitting position he’d assumed while sitting in the basement alone for half an hour, and picked up the CDs and his new boots, wrapping them in the blanket. He stood, waiting for Edgar to finish folding.

Edgar picked the stack of clothing up, and headed towards the stairs. He made it up with little difficulty, and stood at the top waiting for Johnny to do the same. Johnny, who was carrying some less cumbersome baggage, made it up significantly less clumsily. They brought the items to Johnny’s adopted room in the same way; Edgar first, then waiting for Johnny. Johnny remained silent throughout.

Something was still wrong. Johnny had been given gifts from people who announced in a book that they intended to investigate his ring of keys. Something wasn’t adding up. They seemed to think he was suspicious from the start, since, according to Edgar, they had wanted to let something else entirely happen to him, rather than let him live the life he currently was.

Edgar finished setting the clothes in semi-organized piles. Johnny dropped the CDs and boots somewhere close by, and stared at the wall for some time. Something still… wasn’t right.

“Nny, are you alright? Is something bothering you?”

Johnny turned, left the room, slipping slightly with the combination of his socks and the hardwood floors, and threw the door to the other room open. He tore the book off the shelf angrily, and half-slipped back into his room seconds later. Johnny threw the book at Edgar, and it landed somewhere near his feet with a small dust cloud.

“ _That_  is bothering me.”

Edgar reached down to pick it up, an expression of confusion and curiosity on his face. He opened the front and jumped a little. The more he read the more horrified his expression became.

“I… I didn’t know that this was… I mean, I never looked at the books on the shelf, I just filed them there to fill the space,” Edgar said, still in disbelief. He looked at every page with even more horror.

Johnny held out his hand. He would show Edgar the best part. Edgar slowly handed the book over to him, his eyes still glued to the pages as Johnny flipped through them. Johnny scanned a page until he found his own name, jammed his finger on the page and the spot and shoved the book in Edgar’s face.

“This,” Johnny said sharply.

Edgar’s eyes widened again, as his hands slowly grasped the book once more. Johnny took his hand away when he was sure Edgar knew what he was pointing at.

“What the fuck is it with the keys?” Edgar asked the book.

“They seem to think I’m something that needs looking in to, Edgar. Why? Why don’t they trust me in this book, but give me gifts in your basement?” Johnny was going to get answers, dammit. Edgar was going to fill these holes, and he was going to do it  _now_.

“Nny, I don’t know… I mean, well, I have an idea, but the keys… They’re just keys, right? I mean, you got them from a psycho next door to you, right?”

Johnny would answer that, but Edgar wasn’t getting away from the original question. “As far as I know, they’re keys. He was weird looking, and a little creepy, but they’re just keys. They all look normal, that’s it. Keys. But what about  _me_  is making them suspicious?”

Edgar sighed, and took on that look of being pained again. “I can’t tell you.”

“Bullshit. Try again.”

“No, really, I can’t. I promised you I wouldn’t.”

“No, I’m fairly sure you haven’t said anything to  _me_  about it,” Johnny said. When Edgar started to protest, Johnny held a finger up to silence him. “And don’t tell me you told ‘past me,’ because we’ve been over this already.”

Edgar closed the book, and held it under one arm.

“Look,” he said, rubbing his forehead, “I don’t want to argue about who you are or aren’t anymore. I really don’t. I just…,” he looked up. “I just can’t tell you. The memories you have missing are all the things that would prevent your happiness in this life. You… or what was you…whichever… asked to forget it all. That’s why the holes are there in the first place. I can’t do it. I can’t tell you.”

Johnny thought about this, bit his lip a little.  If previous him had gotten rid of those memories, and what Edgar said about memories making a person, would he … become the person Edgar said he had been if he regained said memories? Would the person he’d been demanding that Edgar see that he was …disappear? With the holes, he had become his own person (at least, if he was willing to accept Edgar’s theory) and if he filled them… he could lose himself. 

Johnny smiled. He almost laughed at himself. He was stupid, Edgar’s story was stupid, this entire scenario was stupid. The smile grew the more he thought about everything. Somehow, whether it had been him asking to forget or not, he’d managed to tie himself up in a horrible time-line based doom plot, and ensure that his own life was fucked up forever with a few words. He crossed his arms, and looked at the floor.

And he laughed. Restrained just so his shoulders shook a bit at first, but it soon spiraled into laughter that hurt him somewhere by his hip.

Laughing and laughing.

He looked up several fits of laughter later, to see Edgar’s face in an expression of complete bewilderment.

Johnny wiped a tear from the corner of his eye, still shaking off the remnants of laughter. “Promised me, huh?” He clapped a hand on Edgar’s shoulder, “Alright then! Can’t argue with that!”

Edgar stammered something that might have become a question, but Johnny stepped behind him and not-so-gently started shoving him towards the door before he managed any full words.

“It’s been great, I’m going to try on some of these clothes, pack my stuff and get the hell out, okay?” Johnny said cheerily, pushing Edgar along the floor and into the hall way. 

As soon as Edgar was out far enough, he slammed the door. 

He closed his eyes, and let himself sink against the door, sliding to the floor. One hand still on the doorknob, the other grasping at the door. He clawed at the wood for something, he wasn’t sure what. It had been almost funny a moment ago, but now, he clenched his fist and felt intense hatred towards no one in particular. He really wanted it to be Edgar, but either Edgar wasn’t to blame, or else he was making up a great story that claimed he wasn’t.

Edgar asked if he was ok from the other side. Johnny ignored him.

Fist tighter, fingernails digging into flesh.

Dammit if something was wrong, dammit if he was never going to figure out who he was without ever being himself again, dammit if Edgar did or didn’t have a Jimmy drive. Dammit all, it was his fault somehow.  Was it really going to be better this way? Maybe if he just found out something… small? Something that wouldn’t alter him terribly? Something that he could use as a test, to see if it really changed him. Everything seemed to have been orchestrated so he’d walk around full of holes for the rest of his life.

He determined his old self to be an asshole.

Where was the smallest hole? The smallest break in what little continuity he remembered…  Clenching and unclenching his fist, he thought, searched, for something, anything, that could be tiny enough to give him the smallest feeling of what was missing. If he could find something not so bad in his prior self’s eyes, then maybe…

Nothing.

Nothing connected, it never had. There was no smallest piece. He had bits, he had pieces, he had worn and weathered patches of a mental blanket long since torn to ribbons.

Clenched and unclenched. Clenched again.

Clawed at the door again, for just a moment, before his fist slammed into it.

“FUCK!”

Slumped to the floor again. This time stretched onto the floor and tried to scream into the floorboards. Tried to use just barely painted nails to claw at something that wasn’t there.  Tried to escape something he’d put himself into.

He continued trying to fix something by saying ‘fuck’ through his teeth, trying to tear his way out of it, but nothing mended itself, no solution made itself apparent, nothing sewed itself back together, and he let himself just collapse.

In a heap. A big pathetic heap. A pile of a life he’d managed to ruin before he’d started.

He was tired, so tired. Maybe, after waking, things will have fixed themselves…

Yes.

Maybe.

****

Edgar stood in the hallway, unsure of what had just happened. One moment, he was sure he was connecting with Johnny in joint confusion over this reincarnation issue, and the next Johnny was inside the room screaming and Edgar was outside the room horribly lost.

After what Edgar presumed to be some sort of spasm or psychotic fit left over from last life, Johnny had fallen completely silent. Had he blown a brain cell? Was he alright?

Edgar twisted the doorknob, and noted that Johnny apparently no longer had a death grip on it. He pushed on the door gently at first, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere. He braced his shoulder against it, and pushed harder, it didn’t open easily, nor all the way, but it was enough that Edgar could squeeze through. 

It had been Johnny at the base of the door keeping it from opening. He looked as though he had passed out. From screaming and lack of air, perhaps? Edgar couldn’t be entirely sure what had caused the collapse, but thought perhaps something too emotional had just shut him down. Knowing Johnny, that was entirely possible. Although, the ‘screaming that lead to no air’ solution was pretty likely, too.

Edgar knelt down beside Johnny (who had twisted himself, face down, into a position that would have him hurting for days should he be allowed to remain in it) and shook him a little. This really was not the way Edgar had hoped to introduce Johnny to ‘happy’.  Already, they seemed to be going backwards, and they hadn’t started.

Johnny wasn’t really responding, so Edgar shook him a little harder, and tried talking to him. “Nny? Nny, come on, wake up. Are you alright?”

Johnny mumbled something, and rolled over to face the ceiling. He opened his eyes slowly, and assumed an expression of misery. Edgar couldn’t tell if he had ever really been asleep. Either Johnny didn’t notice Edgar, or else he was choosing to ignore him.

“Nny?” Edgar tried again, “Are you okay?”

Johnny didn’t move from the floor and made no attempts to even glance in Edgar’s direction.

“I’m stuck this way,” Johnny said, closing his eyes again.

Edgar’s first thought was that Johnny had somehow paralyzed himself and that he would now be invisible and an invalid. Thankfully, Johnny moved seconds after he spoke. Bringing his palms to his eyes, Johnny sighed heavily.

“I can’t ever remember any of what I have missing.  You said memories make the person. If I get what he wanted to forget, I’m him, and he’s me. I disappear. He’ll wake up in my body, and everything I am will be extra memories for him.  And you’ll go off and be best friends and ride into the fucking sunset with your complete brains, and I’ll just… stop.”

Edgar bit his lip, tried to think of some other way to look at things, but Johnny’s perspective made a considerable amount of sense. Still, he’d try and make something up. “That’s not true…,” he started.

“I’m stuck, Edgar. All I’ve been looking for is how to get all these holes repaired, and now I find out that once they’re filled, I’m not going to be the same person who wanted them gone.” Johnny half-laughed. “I’ll be someone with all his memories who wants them erased, instead of someone missing them and wanting them back. I doomed myself to be fucked up before I started living all this.”

He sat up and looked at Edgar. “Who do you want me to kill, Edgar?”

How was he crazy already? Just like that? No warning, no nothing? No point at which Edgar could reverse the process? Homicidal again, just like that? He stammered some things in panicked disbelief, and felt something in his chest tighten.

“Nny, I... don’t understand.  I mean, where did this…?”  Communication skills? Gone.

“I can die, or he can," Johnny explained. "It seems that no matter what we do, we both lose, so let’s agree on how to, alright? Either I get memories back, like I wanted, but kill myself in the process, and you get your old me back,  _OR_ , I don’t get memories, like you want, but I stay myself, and you lose the guy you chased here.”

A sigh of relief escaped from Edgar as Nny spoke. While this logic was a little scary, and his willingness to just disappear depending on what Edgar chose was a quite frightening, Johnny wasn’t homicidal yet.

“Look,” Edgar said, considerably calmer, “I don’t want you to go anywhere, and contrary to what you’re saying, I don’t really want the old you back. I’d like you to remember being him to an extent, but you’re much better off like this. Trust me.”

Johnny looked skeptical.

“I don’t understand, then,” he said, turning to lean against the door, “why you chased him here. You got me instead. You should have just died and let it go. Now we’re both fucked up.”

“I’ve already told you this. I wanted to guarantee him, or some form of him, happiness. That’s all. That’s… you. I wasn’t going to allow them to just toss you to the side.” Edgar felt almost hurt that Johnny didn’t seem to fully appreciate what Edgar had done for him. Hurt, and a bit frustrated. Frustration, though, at this point, was no stranger to him.

Johnny traced a pattern on the wood floor near his thigh. “I would rather not have done this at all, then,” he said, watching his finger trace. “I wish you’d have just let them do what they wanted.  I’m going to be half a person for the rest of forever if you have anything to say about it.”

Edgar glared at him. “Is that what you think?” Edgar demanded. “You think I’m here to stalk you through countless lifetimes in order to get the person I want out of it? You think I’m trying to keep you a ‘half-person’?”

Edgar grabbed Johnny’s tracing hand and squeezed it. For a moment, he wanted to make Johnny bleed. Wanted to dig nails into him. Make him see that he wasn’t half. Whole people  _bleed_.

“Don’t you  _dare_. Don’t you dare say you’re half a person.  You’re living whatever you want to be living; you live a complete life as far as I see it. You’ve got nothing holding you back, and everything you have is your own. I’m living the half life if either of us is. None of what I have actually belongs to me, and I live here in this house answering to some cosmic nobodies everyday. You are every bit your  _own_ person, you’ve been telling  _me_  that. Do not dare tell me that someone I’m so fond of wants to think he’s half a person when I think so highly of him as he is.” Edgar flinched slightly at his own use of the word ‘fond.’  Johnny seemed to be jumpy enough about Edgar becoming like Jimmy; ‘fond’ was not going to help.

Johnny flexed a few fingers. “You know,” he said flatly, watching his fingers twitch in Edgar’s grasp, “you don’t have to crush my hands every time you want to make a point.  I am, however… let’s say, ‘interested’ that you’re so fond of me.  What, in your mind, is ‘fond’?”

Edgar blinked. Somehow, Johnny had managed to completely brush off the half person issue.  One minute, it was certainly important to him, the next, he didn’t care so much about his memories as his hand and Edgar’s choice of words.

“My best friend, Nny. That’s it.  I was fond of you before, when you were less than approachable, and I’m fond of you now. Maybe more so now. I enjoyed myself with you here yesterday, and you seemed to be pleased, too. I would say you’re fond of me, too.”

“And that’s it?” Johnny leaned in towards Edgar’s face, narrowing his eyes, staring over the rims of Edgar’s glasses into his eyes. Edgar inched slowly away as Johnny scrutinized him further.

“Yes,” Edgar managed with some degree of confidence. “That’s it.”

Still had a hold on Johnny’s hand.

Johnny backed away, but still appeared suspicious.  He tugged at Edgar’s grasp, and Edgar released the grip. Edgar’s hand burned again, just like when Johnny had shook his hand at the school. He stared at it for a moment, intrigued.

“Why are you ‘fond’ of me?” Johnny asked.

Edgar looked up from his palm at Johnny, who was staring intently at Edgar, knees drawn up to his chin. Johnny asked again when Edgar didn’t give an immediate answer.

“Why?”

“You’re my best friend, Nny. What more do you want?”

“You’ve known me for two days.”

Edgar sighed. “‘Best’ is a relative term, Nny.  You are, currently, the only friend I have, and even if you should turn out to be a horrible person, you’re still the best friend I’ve got. The best of something could be terrible in someone else’s opinion, but if it’s all you’ve got… If it’s the least awful of all…Not to say that you’re awful, but…”

Johnny smiled. Edgar couldn’t really see the smile on his lips so much as in his eyes. They took on a certain glint when something really pleased him.

“That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Johnny said, his grin almost audible.

Edgar’s turn to smile. “Thank you.”

“Doesn’t mean everything you say doesn’t suck, that’s just the least sucky. ‘Best’ is relative, after all.”  More of that smile.

Edgar laughed softly. “Touché.”  He paused for a moment, and took an opportunity to just watch Johnny grin at him.

“That’s why I’m so fond of you.  You think differently than most people. You’re brilliant.” He shrugged, and half laughed again. “At least, I think so.”

“Isn’t brilliant relative too?”

“Oh, probably.”

They sat in silence for a long time. Edgar poked at the book now and then, but didn’t want to bring it up again. It had managed to bring up more questions and more screaming than it was worth. Edgar would concern himself with all of this when Johnny was happier. Yes. Happy. Make Johnny happy.

After several minutes, Johnny finally broke the silence.

“What now?” He was asking Edgar, but watching Edgar’s fingers play with the pages of the book.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“What do I do now?  Now that I feel like I’ve got a pack of winged and haloed lunatics after me because I’ve got a ring of keys, I can’t feel quite at ease, you know? And the more I stay here, the more they’ll try to cater to me or-”

“That’s indirect. I’ve told you that already. They sent those things for me, in hopes of making you happy.”

Johnny got a disgusted expression on his face.

“They…they’re supposed to be ‘Heaven’ and they give you  _stuff_ to make me happy?  Things. Possessions. Wouldn’t they be…I don’t know, giving me  _enlightenment_  or something instead?”

Edgar shrugged. “Instant Conviction in a Box, just add water?”

“Are you still like that, Edgar?”

“Still like what?” Edgar looked at Johnny curiously.

“Do you still have faith?”

Edgar leaned towards Johnny a little, unsure of what he was hearing. “What faith?” he asked.

“You know… your faith in ‘God and all that.’ You told me that once, right? That you were into that kind of stuff?” Johnny was playing with a frayed bit of fabric on his pant leg, concentrating on how much of the thread he could pull before the pants fell apart, and didn’t seem to notice the wonder that Edgar was sure was coming through in his face.

“Nny…”

“I wondered if you still thought it was so great after being up there, or after living through this stuff.  After seeing they’re a giant pack of suspicious fucks, I mean.”

“Nny.”

“I really don’t care for all of that myself. I guess since you’ve been up there, that pretty much proves that it’s there, but… my life is my own. I’m not devoting it to worshipping like some submissive puppy; I’m going to do something amazing. I have a hard time sitting back and being content with all that wholesome kind of shit. Do you understand?”

“Nny…,” Edgar repeated again, his hand shaking, “I… I didn’t tell you I had any faith.”

“Really? Huh… I swear you’ve told me that before. On the phone maybe? I mean, I told you that I envied it, because really, it’s kind of nice to just toss fate or a god into the equation when you’re really desperate… I know I told you that.”

Edgar watched Johnny play with the loose string on his pant leg. Part of his brain hadn’t processed this quite yet. He swallowed once. “I told you I had faith, and you said you envied me, yes. But not in this lifetime.”

Johnny’s eyes went wide as his gaze moved from his pants to Edgar’s face.  They sat that way for some time, afraid to disrupt whatever it was that had made Johnny remember. Again, it was Johnny who spoke first.

“What now?”

“I don’t know.”

Edgar was scared. He wasn’t sure why, exactly, after all, Johnny had remembered him, and he had wanted that. Something was still frightening here. Something…

“Edgar… I don’t want to disappear.”  Johnny’s eyes were still wide; Edgar wasn’t alone in his fear. However, he suspected the fear was for different reasons.

“You won’t,” Edgar said.

“How do you know? That memory came from no where! They could come flooding back on me, and drown me in my own thoughts! I could suffocate in this other person!”  Johnny shook a little, and Edgar worried he’d collapse on the floor again.

“You won’t,” Edgar said, taking hold oh Johnny’s shoulders, “because you won’t be happy if you disappear, and I’m here to make you happy.  I’m not going to let you disappear.”

****

_“They have one of these people too, don’t they?”_

_“Yeah, I’m not worried about it. Mine and theirs would never get along anyway.”_

****

It was then that Edgar noticed the stereo had never been turned off.  In the silence that followed his promise to make Johnny happy, the song had drifted its way up the stairs. Johnny remained against the door, eyes still wide, Edgar’s hands still on his shoulders, but also seemed aware of the music.

 

 _"Barely had we landed on this planet Earth_  
Came to the conclusion survival was the word   
Back in the beginning to lift the mental fog   
Each and every person created their own god

 _Planning our protection huts were built for sleep_  
Making new discoveries of earthly energies  
Huts turned into houses and wood became concrete  
Natural progression but where would this all lead?

 _Far beyond the farthest corners_  
Of our stratosphere  
While the planets go on spinning  
We are banished here"

Not surprising to Edgar, Johnny knew all the words.  Another song that sounded a little old, he noticed. There must not have been a lot of very current stuff buried deep in that choir office.

Edgar leaned back, and let go of Johnny’s shoulders.  Johnny pulled his legs tightly against his chest, and pressed his forehead to his knees. He mumbled something that actually sounded like ‘I’m frightened.’  Edgar wanted to help, really, but felt he had done enough to make Johnny fearful of his intentions, so just sat. Johnny didn’t cry; there were no shaking shoulders or heaving gasps, he just kept himself in that balled up state while Edgar watched him.

_"Now we are synthetic, genetic point the way_  
 _We'll be building humans from plastic parts one day_  
 _Somewhere a computer records us from afar_  
 _Looking for the error in the system on this star_

_Far beyond the farthest corners_  
 _Of our stratosphere_  
 _While the planets go on spinning_  
 _We are banished here_ "

Johnny looked up a few verses into the song. He looked at Edgar, blank expression on his face.

“Have you ever played any video games, Edgar?”

“Here and there. I used to play when I was little, you know, back when the house decorated itself.”

“What kind did you play?”

“I had a few of those big adventure ones. You know, where you’re the main guy, and you run around and collect people to get into a million random encounters with, all to go kill one big guy at the end? Those kind.”

“Oh, perfect.”

“Perfect?”

“You know the NPC’s? The non-playing characters? The little guys who are there just to support your character? The ones who have to repeat the same thing over and over? The ones … no one ever really looks at?”

“Yes…?”

_"Out of our creation, we have lost control_  
 _Banished on a planet where dreams are bought and sold_  
 _Somewhere a computer observing how we are_  
 _Searching for the error in the system on this star_

_Far beyond the farthest corners_  
 _Of our stratosphere_  
 _While the planets go on spinning_  
 _We are banished here_ "

“I think I’m your NPC.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song this time is Peter Schilling’s “Error in the System.” I have German version and the English. Both are fantastic.


	8. Video Kid

There were entirely too many long silences in this house.  Edgar didn’t notice them when he was here alone; he’d talk to himself all day if need be.  Now, after Johnny had been here making a mess and making Edgar laugh for a day and half, silences were rather frightening.  He didn’t notice how much silence he had until Johnny had done his best to fill it. Silence is funny like that; the more you add to it, the less of it there is.

Maybe Johnny’s concept of himself was like that too.

Admittedly, it wasn’t totally silent; there were still strains of whatever Johnny had put into the stereo sneaking into the room from downstairs, but they weren’t loud enough to be considered helpful. There had still been a horrible misfire in communication or ideas or  _something_ , and Edgar was waiting to see if he or Johnny would feel the need to speak, or just cry, first. No amount of random background music was going to make it any less of a silence.

Johnny’s forehead was down against his knees again and Edgar noticed that he seemed to be randomly clenching his fists. In a way, it was almost refreshing to Edgar that Johnny was still so unstable in places. It helped him hold onto the idea that other Johnny was still affecting this one.  And really, contrary to Johnny’s assumptions, Edgar didn’t want the old Johnny back; the old Johnny would have killed him on at least six different occasions this weekend alone.  What he did want, though, was the old Johnny’s  _good_  memories. The ones that didn’t involve cutting anyone to ribbons, or slitting them nose to navel. The memories of Edgar should have been nice, actually.  They had managed to be friends in some horridly twisted way, and Edgar really wanted Johnny to see he wasn’t making this ‘best friend’ business up.

“I want to go home. Go home and just…,” Johnny trailed off as he pressed his face against his knees a bit harder.  He looked like he was trying to pull himself into a shell.

And here, Edgar suddenly felt conflicted.  He really  _should_  be offering to help Johnny pack, and get him on his way back to the school. He  _should_  do that. What he  _wanted_  to do was simply let Johnny stay. They’d had a good time the day before, screaming or not.  Edgar was even fairly sure they had run out of things to scream about. That could be the optimism talking though.

He sighed, took a look around the room, then settled his gaze on the book beside him.

Right.

“Nny… show me what you want to take home with you, I’ll help you pack.”

****

Twenty minutes later, everything that Johnny felt he couldn’t live without had been packed in the bag he had brought with him, and he was on his way out the door. As he stood on the porch, Edgar ran through a checklist of everything he thought Johnny may have forgotten.  CD Player? Yes, of course.  Boots? Yes.  Cherry Fruit snacks?  In the bag.

“Do you have my-?”

Johnny silently held up the key ring, Edgar’s house key between his thumb and index finger.

“Right, you do. Ok then. I’ll –uh, see you tomorrow then.”

Johnny pocketed the keys (as much as they could be with all the other things he’d shoved in his pockets) and turned away. Edgar watched him walk along the sidewalk until he disappeared from view, and smiled to himself. 

Johnny still walked the same way.

Edgar retreated into his now empty house, and regarded the living room. A disaster. He flopped onto the couch and stared at the ceiling. For once, he really didn’t feel like cleaning.

****

The sun was shining, but the school was as dark and cold looking as usual when Johnny arrived home. There were some big trucks in front getting ready to leave, so he assumed who ever ran the fundraiser wasn’t quite finished with the choir room yet. He slipped out back instead. The playground for the elementary kids was just across the parking lot; he’d kill some time there.

He wove his way between the cars, noting the number of dents obviously from stray baseballs that escaped the fifth graders’ daily ‘boys versus girls’ battles, and walked over a small hill into the mulch of the playground. The swing set was attached to a slide, a jungle gym and some miscellaneous nets and bars for kids to injure themselves on.

Johnny threw his bag in a hollow near the bottom of the jungle gym and sat on a swing. He was a bit too tall for it, and it would have been too narrow and too tight on him had he not had such a tiny frame. No, he wasn’t too thin. Little kids were just getting fatter every day; they probably made these things huge now.

He sat for a few minutes before it got uncomfortable, and then decided he wanted a look at the world. He climbed the tower in the center using all the nets and such that he was sure had hanged a kid a few years back and sat cross legged on the top. It wasn’t much of a view, but it was something. The breeze was a little cooler up here, the rest of the world a little smaller. This spot had been more thrilling when he was younger. And not only because Jimmy had fallen off of it once, though that certainly helped; it was just easier to be awed when he was smaller.

His phone started ringing in the tower below him, but he chose to ignore it. He really wasn’t in the mood to insult one of Chet’s brain-dead relatives. He was surprised the phone lasted so long, really. Surely this Chet guy would have realized the phone had been hijacked by now and had the phone company shut it off. He continued his surveillance of the street, sky, and school to the tune of  _‘Ride of the Valkyries,’_ watching the cars drive too quickly, the birds chirp too loudly, and the trucks load too slowly.

For a moment, he wondered about the amount of processing power it would take for someone to operate such a complicated game. A game where the NPC found out he was, in fact, the NPC.

He shifted his weight a little, and the keys clinked in his pocket. Perhaps he could visit the key guy, and see if he knew anything. Maybe he wasn’t quite as batty as Johnny had originally thought.  After all this with books that write themselves and best friends with strange intentions, a man who wears an obscene amount of keys, locks and chains seemed to fit right in.  He had said the locks were for security. Security.

From what?

If Heaven wanted to look at the keys and Johnny had got them from a guy claiming a need to secure something… That guy might actually be completely aware of what was happening. He also might fake it out of sheer insanity, but if Johnny ran the story by Devi, he was sure they could determine how much truth was in it.

He slid off the tower onto the net and jumped down to the mulch. He brushed a few stray pieces of bark from his palms, retrieved his bag, and tossed it over his shoulder. ‘Key Guy’ would provide him with some answers. Or at least entertainment.

As he neared the house, he noticed someone pacing around the front of it. A guy a few years older than Johnny (he’d graduated or dropped out or something a few years ago) wearing a long black coat, and sporting a strange spiked hair cut, was staring curiously at the front of the house as though he’d never seen a front door before.

Johnny walked up to his side, and stared at the house as well, trying to match the Trenchcoat Guy’s gaze in an effort to understand what was so odd. He stood there for some time, listening to ‘hmmm’ as the other guy continued to stare.

“So, what is it?” Johnny asked after a few minutes, tired of squinting at the house.

Trenchcoat Guy jumped, flailed his arms a bit, and nearly fell over. Johnny backed up a few steps, eyes wide, hoping to avoid getting hit. Trenchcoat Kid straightened his collar and cleared his throat.

“It’s nothing.  I was just watching.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow and looked at the house, which, as far as he could tell, wasn’t doing any sort of jig, and then looked back at Mr. Trenchcoat.  Why was it that the only people he could interact with were complete basket cases?

“Watching what?”

“Oh, you know, things. Just to see if they were… well, if they’d… Well, that’s enough of that!” he suddenly yelled as though hoping someone would overhear, “I’ll see you later, kid, there’s really something  _else_  I should be watching. For the good of man kind and…stuff.”

He looked around, as though making sure there was no one else around, then leaned down and whispered, “Be on guard, something’s not right with these two.”  He made a small gesture towards the house, before attempting to spin dramatically away. When he failed and crashed into the sidewalk, he glanced over his shoulder to meet Johnny’s ‘what the fuck’ expression and shuffled away into the parking lot.

Johnny stared after him for some time.  It took some time to completely process what had just happened, and how completely crazy that kid had been. No wonder he had left the school a few years ago, they probably sent him to the asylum he’d escaped from today.

Johnny adjusted his backpack, and took to the house’s creaky wooden stairs. They were sunken in the middle, and had warped significantly with the weather. The porch wasn’t much better off, and he wondered how Key Guy had ever trusted the stairs to hold his weight. He’d been sitting on the stairs when he first met Johnny and beckoned him over, and how he didn’t crash right through them two seconds later, Johnny had no idea.

There was a sound coming from the house, a kind of beeping. He poked the yellowed button for the doorbell, and waited for some sort of reaction from the person he assumed to be inside.

Nothing.

He pushed it again, harder this time, as though it would make a difference, and held it in. This time he heard some confused voices, then footsteps, and clinking of chains. Excellent.

The door opened, and Key Man looked ready to greet Johnny, but as soon as he made eye contact, slammed the door.

Johnny blinked for a second, stunned, before reacting.

“Hey! What the fuck?!” he screamed, bashing his hand against the door, “Open the door, dammit!”

More voices inside. One sounded completely confused, the other doing a terrible job of covering something up. Johnny put his ear to the door. Music, beeping, and voices.

“… screaming?”

“Oh, nothing. Just some Mormons or something. I always hate telling them the truth, you know, we loose more religious nuts that way.”

“Mormons aren’t going to scream ‘fuck’ at the door…”

“It’s no one, really!”

There was some shuffling, some clinking and then the door opened again. This time a fairly normal looking guy. Johnny opened his mouth to say something when Normal Guy, instead of greeting Johnny and apologizing, turned to Key Guy and screamed.

“You’ve got to be KIDDING!”

“I  _TOLD_  YOU!” Key Guy defended.

“I didn’t think it would be  _THIS_  bad!” Normal Guy shrieked, motioning to Johnny, “This is INSANE!”

Key Guy moved in front of Normal Guy, and took a hold of the door knob.

“Excuse us a moment, won’t you?” he said, grinning and leaning down to Johnny’s eye level. A key dangling from his hair swayed in front of Johnny’s face for a moment, and then he shut the door, leaving Johnny on the porch staring open-mouthed at the door, listening to random panicked chatter.

“You gave them to  _HIM_?” Normal Guy hissed.

“Listen, listen, he’s really got it. He understands; it is  _fine_.”

“He left stacks of bodies in my basement last time! He  _killed_  people!”

They seemed to be attempting to whisper, but it wasn’t working so well.

“Shhhh! He’ll hear you! I have told you before that things will be different.  I once said the end was near, and was I not painfully correct? Trust me, amigo.”

“‘Trust me’ and ‘Allow me to give this maniac the keys to-’”

“SHHHH!”

“… totally different things.” Normal Guy finished.

The tones finally dropped to a level Johnny could no longer hear through the door, but he continued to stand there on the porch.

Finally the door clicked and Key Guy appeared again. He pulled some chains that trailed after him out of the door frame and closed the door behind him as he stepped out onto the porch. He’d apparently fixed things with Normal Guy.

“I came to ask about these,” Johnny said, holding up his keys. He figured if Normal Guy had anything to say about it, time with Key Guy would be brief, so he made his case as quickly as possible.

“There is nothing to tell. Just a set of keys.”

“Don’t lie to me. I’m not so retarded as to not see some things on my own. A friend of mine has a book from some people who seem to think these are suspicious,” Johnny said, narrowing his eyes.

“Really, I can’t tell you anything. You have what you asked for; the keys to the school.”

“And?” Johnny prompted.

Key Guy was silent for a while.

“Just keep a good hold on those, kid.  One of those keys is a little more valuable than the others,” he finally said, his tone suddenly softer.

“Johnny, not ‘kid.’”  When he spoke his own name he felt a tug on the key ring, even though Key Guy hadn’t moved or touched any keys.

“I know your name,” Key Guy said, backing away a little. He looked over his shoulder at the window in the door and smiled.

“Want to come in? We have cookies.”

****

The house wasn’t very well lit, and looked to be in great need of updating. There were also boxes piled up along the walls, much like Edgar’s basement. Upon removing his boots, Johnny thought the floor seemed to be entirely too warm, although he wondered if that was just because he wasn’t used to shaggy brown and orange carpet. The carpet continued until the kitchen down the hall, where it was replaced with green linoleum. The refrigerator was a shade of puke green much like the floor.

Key Guy led Johnny into the living room, after an unsuccessful attempt to get him to put his bag down by the door.  Normal Guy was sitting on the couch, lazily holding a video game controller, waiting for Johnny and Key Guy to get situated, although he looked a little nervous. A blinking light flashed over the room, and Johnny saw that the game Normal Guy was hooked up to was on pause. These freaks had actually been playing video games when Johnny rang the bell.

Key Guy motioned to a random chair and invited Johnny to sit down, while he took his spot on the couch, and retrieved his controller. The flashing stopped, the pause was undone, and Key and Normal went back to trying to blow each other’s spaceships up. Johnny sat with his bag in his lap, watching them. A coffee table in front of them did, in fact, have cookies on it. 

There was some pounding music in the background, and Johnny really couldn’t tell if it was coming from the television or a stereo somewhere else in the house until he heard lyrics. Too complicated for the old game they were playing. Oddly enough, the song seemed to be about a game, though he didn’t catch the first few words.

_“…aze, next nothing new_  
 _got the pretty boy beat him up black and blue._  
 _broke the sissy boy's teeny toy heart in two,_  
 _turned him into a video kid like you._

_I know we're just pretending,_  
 _there's no window for escape._  
 _I know you see right through me._  
 _there's no promise left to break.”_

The house felt too busy with so much happening. Music and clutter and dark and beeping and lights and cookies. Just… too much.

_“shot the pretty boy killed him on the Commodore._  
 _need a new game, need a new something more._  
 _got a new face, got a new way to score._  
 _got a voice like something I've heard before._

_I know we're just pretending,_  
 _there's no window for escape._  
 _I know you see right through me._  
 _there's no promise left to break.”_

The song continued with several ‘oh’s and finally faded out into something else. It almost felt like they were trying to cover something up with so many distractions in the house at once. Like maybe an alien landing pad upstairs or a bioengineering facility in the basement. That would explain the warm floors, at least.

The game finally ended with a blinding explosion on Key Guy’s side of the screen, and Normal Guy declaring victory. Thankfully, they didn’t start a new round.  Key Guy turned to Johnny, and offered him a cookie with assurance that they weren’t poisoned.

“I’m just here to know what’s so special about these keys,” Johnny said, taking a cookie anyway. Ginger snaps.

“There is nothing, they are just keys. Have I introduced you?” he asked, motioning to Normal Guy.  Normal Guy sank in his seat a little, and Johnny was less than amused at the blatant refusal to answer all of all his questions.

“That’s Squee.”

“Todd,” Normal Guy said.

“Todd? I like ‘Squee’ better,” Johnny half-muttered.

“And I,” Key Guy said, sitting up straighter “am the d-”

“Pepito,” Todd interrupted.

Key Guy/Pepito slumped against the couch.

“Yes. Pepito. Right.”

Johnny sighed, and rubbed his eyes a few times. He had a feeling this conversation was going to go absolutely nowhere.

“Look,” he said, “if you’re not going to tell me anything of use to me, then I’ll go and find it out on my own.” He stood up and swung his bag back onto his back. “So, you two can tell me now what is so important about these keys, and why ‘Squee’ here thinks I’ve killed people, or I’ll go and find these things out myself. It makes no difference to me. I have someone very close to home that I’m sure I can wring the answers from.”

Pepito smiled and stood up. He put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder and steered him towards the door.

“You go right ahead and try, kid.  I can guarantee that he won’t tell you a thing, because our sides agree on that much; there’s nothing to be gained from you becoming what you were again…”

He’d managed to get Johnny onto the porch by this point, and handed him his boots. Pepito’s smile continued and Johnny caught sight of Todd looking concerned in the doorway.

Johnny found he could barely think let alone speak. Pepito said goodbye (“See you in a few years.”), and closed the door. Johnny found that a witty retort would simply not come to him.  Pepito’s manner had changed quite drastically after Johnny’s last demand, and he seemed to know that Johnny meant to talk to Edgar. He had spoken of ‘sides,’ Squee seemed to think he was a mass murderer, and there was allegedly something special about one of his keys. Better yet, something in the keys had reacted to Johnny’s name.

Johnny sat on the porch and pulled the boots on. He checked his pockets; the keys were still there.

“Johnny,” he said.  He felt the keys tug toward the house, then stop abruptly. Just peachy. As though he really needed the keys to be  _possessed_  too.

He slid off the porch, saw that the loading trucks were gone, and headed to toward the school. He wanted to just slip in, set his things down, and stick his head in the water fountain. Anything frustrating could be cured with a quick head in the fountain. Even if it wasn’t his head; it was just as therapeutic to see Jimmy sputtering around in the water as it was to feel the water himself.

Sadly, it was still Sunday. Devi and Jimmy wouldn’t be anywhere near the school now, and hell if he was going back to Edgar’s.  He needed someone to talk to or something to pass time.  No one who would keep information from him, no one who would slam doors on him, no one who would question him; just someone to vent on. He really didn’t want to be letting all these things stew for too long.

The back door unlocked and Johnny gave it that extra shove it always seemed to need before it would budge. The lights had been turned off when the fundraiser people left, and they had rearranged the rows of chairs. Johnny had just got them to looking like someone sat in them daily, to looking ‘lived in’, and these people had arranged them too precisely. Too stiff. It would take another few weeks to get the room to look properly used again.  At least it would give him something to occupy his time with.

He sat in the chair closest to his office. One by one, then.

****

_“I told you you’d lose faith in me.”_

_“Pepito! He’s a maniac!”_

_“ Was a maniac, amigo.”_

_“I’m still not sure if you should have trusted him…Something’s not…”_

_“Hey, who better for the job, right?  There is no one else; he’s perfect.”_

_“And if it happens again…?”_

_“Then you can reset me.”_

****

The water was cold.

Streams of water and soap dripped from his elbows and flowed into the little square channels on the tile floor.  It seeped out into the locker room, and merged into a foamy river as it was sucked down the drain.

He sat, legs tangled together, on the floor of the tiled shower watching the water and soap swirl around him as it slid off naked skin. After a while, he wasn’t even bothered by the temperature.  His nightly ritual usually consisted of warmer water, but for whatever reason he was convinced the warmth would lull him to sleep and he’d either drown or be found naked down here in the morning, so had opted for straight cold.

The locker room showers weren’t used anymore, so he’d often unlock the janitors’ closet, take out all the cleaning supplies and bleach and sterilize a section of the showers until he was secure in its level of clean. After a few weeks of living at the school, one particular section of the showers was looking a little too clean, so he’d started moving to a different spot every night as to not arouse any sort of suspicion. He knew that he went unnoticed or completely invisible to most of the school, but he wasn’t sure if he could be seen by exorcists or Voodoo priestesses and really didn’t want to take the chance.

He always liked to use the shower as somewhere to think, but it was difficult at times with sports events every night and gym classes during the day. Sure, no one used the shower, but they would certainly hear it running. Plus, no matter how invisible, the prospect of being naked around a bunch of rowdy baseball players was not an idea he looked on with any sort of fondness. Thus, most of his thinking had happened on the weekends. This weekend had been a waste for thinking thus far; he’d done more to get closer to insanity than think deep thoughts about himself and the world while at Edgar’s.

Edgar wasn’t bad, really. Johnny had had fun with him, tearing his house apart and everything. Edgar wasn’t an idiot, and he didn’t seem to be driven purely by insanity or hormones, both of which were a nice change.  He had given Johnny a whole room to himself, had tolerated his music, had attempted to react to the gifts from Heaven in a way he thought Johnny would approve of, and had generally been great to be with. Johnny would certainly go back on the weekends; he would just hijack Edgar’s shower for thinking.  

And his washer and dryer. Yeah.

Cram a weekend’s worth of thinking into one shower. He could do it.  He turned the hot water on fully and tilted his head back and let the spray of the shower sting his face, then leaned forward and out of the way of the stream. This thinking called for a wider river.

****

The morning bell rang, and Johnny picked himself up off of the beanbag. He had a terrible ache in his shoulder from sleeping there, although he really couldn’t remember why he’d slept on the beanbag to begin with. He rubbed his shoulder a few times, and glanced around the room. He’d found nice homes for all the things he’d received at Edgar’s; they just made the office look more and more like home.

The door clicked, and Devi’s head popped in. She’d worn her hair down today; must be some sort of occasion.

“Nny? Are you alright?”

He shook the last clouds of sleep from his vision, and nodded.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“We didn’t see you all weekend,” Devi said, tone dripping with a ‘Where were you?’ subtext.

He sat up and let his feet touch the floor.  He’d put the socks with holes back on last night, thankfully. He didn’t need to be explaining what he was doing with new socks quite yet.

“I stayed with Edgar. You know, the accident-prone kid from the other day.”

A cry of ‘WHAT?!’ echoed from the choir room, and Jimmy appeared from behind Devi who groaned at the sound of his voice.

“What were you doing with him?!” Jimmy demanded.

“Nothing,” Johnny answered flatly.

“You could have stayed with m- US. You just met that kid; you’re too good for him. What if he tried to-“

“Tried to  _what_? Get me to sleep with him? You mean like you, Mr. “I have but one bed, and my trailer has no heat woe is me keep me warm please”?” Johnny asked, grinning. “I think I would have dealt with it quite well. You’ve given me a lot of practice.”

Jimmy crossed his arms and rolled his eyes.

“Besides,” Johnny said, grabbing his boots from the corner and pulling them on, “he didn’t do anything. We had a good time, for the most part. I think you two’ll like him.  He’s not nearly as wimpy as he looked.”

“There’s a relief,” Devi remarked. “I was worried we’d need to peel him off of the floor every time you looked at him…”

“Speaking of that,” Johnny said, “where’s … uh, Tanya or whoever?”

Devi raised an eyebrow at him, seemingly unsure of the connection between the two thoughts, but answered anyway.

“Tenna? She’s out in the commons area. Said she wanted to check something out. You never know with her. I think she tried to order Chinese again.” Devi shrugged and sat down in an old worn chair, propping her legs up on the wooden desk beside it.

“Again?” Jimmy asked, falling into the beanbag Johnny had just been sleeping in, “She could at least order pizza or something…”

“Tacos wouldn’t be bad, actually,” Johnny said, taking a seat on the desk.

“Tenna just likes noodles,” Devi said, staring at the ceiling. “There’s no refusing that girl her noodles. Especially spicy ones.”

Jimmy had sunk considerably in the bean bag, and appeared quite comfortable; his eyes closed. “Why is she ordering food at 7:30 in the morning, anyway?” he asked.

Johnny and Devi shrugged.

It felt good to not have to worry about matters of cosmic fate anymore. For at least a morning, Johnny could just sit in this room and  _be_. No haunted books and keys, no magic boxes, just what was here in this room. Just these people, this room, this furniture, this feeling. Just home. Home and this ache in his shoulder. He rubbed it again.

A few moments later, Johnny heard Tenna’s voice excitedly talking about something, he assumed noodles, and she soon appeared at the door.  She wasn’t carrying any noodles, but she was holding Edgar’s hand. He waved sheepishly, grinning nervously, from behind her.

“Found him, Devi! Sorta cute in a lame sorta way, isn’t he? I think we could trade him for  _lots_  of noodles.”

Tenna was grinning madly, while everyone else stared at her, entirely unsure of which question was most important to ask first.

“Uh, Tenna?” Devi was the first to speak, “We’re not trading him for food.”

“Really?” Tenna stuck out her lower lip in disappointment, “He would’ve made for some really great Lo Mein… Anyway, I found him for you!”  She pulled him forward and shoved him into the center of the room, still smiling broadly.

Johnny tilted his head to one side as he looked from Devi and Tenna to Edgar and back again. Edgar had started rubbing his arm. A habit of his, Johnny had noticed.

“Why were you looking for him?” Johnny questioned.

“Oh, well, when we didn’t see you all weekend, conversation turned to him, and I mentioned to Tenna that we should find him and memorize all his vital stats like where he lives and his blood type and stuff.” She glared at Tenna. “And  _someone_ didn’t understand that I was joking.”

“Well, now you can ask!” Tenna defended.

Devi said something about Tenna taking her jokes too seriously; Tenna insisted that she get out more. This was an argument Johnny had heard at least a dozen times before, even before he cared about Tenna’s name. Edgar was still looking uncomfortable in the center of the room, and Jimmy had taken to glaring at him.

Johnny leaned back behind the desk and felt around for the old office chair. He remembered there had a been a slightly unsteady, but fairly lightweight one stashed back there when he’d ‘moved in.’ When he located it and managed a good grip he picked it up over his head, fought with it somewhat clumsily, and set it down in front of the desk.

“Edgar, here,” he said, grinning, “sit down. We’re all friends here, right?”

“I suppose so,” Edgar replied, getting comfortable in the chair, “I’m not sure if everyone quite agrees, though.” He glanced over at Jimmy, who did his best to look menacing.

Johnny looked over the room, and for a second felt very detached from everything. Devi and Tenna half-argued at the door, while Jimmy seemed to be trying to will Edgar to be struck by lightning. Everyone else there wanted the same things he did. Everyone wanted to know, to remember. He could start talking about keys and books and Pepito now. He could ask Edgar why ‘Squee’ thought that Johnny had killed people. But after spending so much time going into the nature of this remembering, he wasn’t sure he really wanted to do it, much less suffer all over again when the others had no holes, no cosmically assured emptiness. While they remembered everything, since Heaven hadn’t decided that they were dangerous, he’d be left with his empty places, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to give them so much.

And although he often complained about the way they were, a deep part of him was afraid they’d change.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song is 'Video Kid' by The Birthday Massacre


	9. Above All the Silence

Tenna  _had_ ordered Chinese.

It only took a few dives into the old chair and the nearby lockers to get enough money to pay for it when it arrived, although the delivery guy didn’t seem too keen on being paid in miscellaneous change mixed with paper clips and chair lint. He also was not as impressed with the CD of random songs as Tenna demanded he be.

Regardless, five fairly invisible students now sat randomly draped over the furniture in an old choir office, nursing small portions of takeout Lo-Mein.  Devi and Johnny poked at theirs with chopsticks, while Tenna shoveled hers with a plastic spork from the cafeteria. Jimmy stabbed idly at his with his fork, but seemed disinterested. And, sitting in front of the desk, was Edgar, with a paper plate full of donated Lo-Mein from the other members of the group, as Tenna hadn’t thought to order him any of his own despite wanting to trade him  _for_ them . He felt completely horrible about the whole thing; not only had  _he_  not paid for it, but the group as a whole really hadn’t either. Unless paper clips were now accepted currency, of course.

After several minutes of silent chewing, Tenna finished inhaling her noodles and threw single packaged fortune cookies at everyone. Everyone, that is, except Edgar, who was left without one for being added to the group a little too late.

“Read ‘em out loud with ‘in bed’ on the end!’ she commanded.

No one else had actually finished eating, but since Tenna was already well into tearing the wrapper off of her cookie, the others opened theirs, too.

“You have a true friendly spirit in bed!” Tenna read proudly.

Devi blinked at her, but took a glance at her own slip of paper and read it aloud too. “You are great at influencing people,” she said. Tenna glared at her. “In bed,” Devi muttered, rolling her eyes.

Jimmy was next, as Tenna stared at him, unblinking.

“Your sense of justice is great in bed,” he recited, grinning. She seemed to be satisfied with that, as her gaze turned next to Johnny.

“Bad luck and extreme misfortune will infest your pathetic soul for all eternity …in bed,” he said flatly.

They stared at him. Tenna’s blinks were almost audible.

“You will soon embark on a great journey in bed,” Johnny said after several seconds of silence, tossing the fortune aside and sounding bored and seemingly disappointed that no one had found his alternative fortune more amusing. He returned to his Lo-Mein, pulling stray noodles back into the container.

Edgar sighed. He didn’t mind not having a cookie, really. He had enough fortunes at home on his coffee table. Plus, now he didn’t have to read anything with ‘in bed’ tacked on the end of it. He continued eating in hopes of looking unfazed and thus avoiding Jimmy’s occasional glares.

No one asked him to read anything, just as they didn’t bother to ask him to do anything at all. Time went by and he sat there feeling as though he were completely alien to Johnny’s world behind the choir room; the solitary human in a room where the others were already glowing and green.  There were talks of how often Johnny was able to remember Tenna’s name (Johnny maintained that it came and it went, that it was easily confused with Tonya or Terra or any of the other zillion things he’d called her in addition to her real name. Devi told him he was lazy or losing his mind. Tenna, for her part, didn’t seem to care about the entire thing.), and discussions of how valid Jimmy’s tally of beaten up seventh graders was (‘You can’t count the same kid twice, Jimmy.’  ‘It was two separate classes!’ ‘He was still mangled from the previous hour! It doesn’t count!’).

Edgar glanced at his surroundings as the argument raged half-heartedly around him. As much as Johnny talked about not liking Jimmy, Edgar saw that the group was close anyway. If not by the way they teased, then certainly by the look of the room around them. He’d seen polaroids of the group on the wall the last time he’d been here, but had never had a chance to really look closely. Every picture was a random candid shot, except for one that had been stuck to the door frame. That shot was the group, plus part of Devi’s finger in the upper corner, sitting happily on the desk Edgar was now situated in front of. They looked so normal in that one image, while all the others reminded Edgar of how not normal his new acquaintances were.

One picture was of Jimmy with a giant welt on his head, with Johnny standing beside him, showing off a baseball bat and a giant grin.  Another of Johnny and Jimmy showed them shoving full pieces of pizza in their mouths. From the expression on their faces, Edgar gathered that the pizza had been for some class party that Johnny and Jimmy were not a part of. 

A slightly faded shot of Devi that was taped onto a stack of records showed her spray painting a strange looking doodle of a girl on a bathroom stall. Devi looked a few years younger in that one as she hadn’t yet gotten a hold of purple hair dye. Other pictures of Devi were harder to come by, as it seemed she did all of the shooting. One that actually did feature Devi confused Edgar and was partially covered by a poster. It showed Devi looking over her shoulder angrily and showing the camera a very blurry middle finger. Someone, Edgar suspected Johnny, was there with her, but he was obscured by the poster.   
   
Three pictures sat in a line on the side of an old cassette organizer, each of a building of some type. The school, a worn down old building, and a dingy old trailer. Their homes, it seemed. Edgar didn't understand why they needed photos, but he didn't see any reason to ask. He'd never understand the answer.

The room had gotten quiet aside from the soft rhythm of Johnny tapping on the desk behind Edgar’s head.

“So…,” Johnny started casually. “I talked to the crazy neighbor man the other day.”

Devi sounded just as casually bored in her interest, or lack thereof. “Oh, yeah? What did he have to offer you this time? Pizza?”

Johnny stopped tapping to rub some random spot on the desk. He inspected his finger as though checking for dust. “Cookies, actually. Ginger snaps.”

“Poisoned?”

“Most likely.”

“Typical.”

Jimmy looked up from tossing his Lo-Mein around in its container, and shot a curious look at Johnny, but not before stopping to make a face at Edgar. “What did that guy want? Didn’t just give you cookies…,” Jimmy prodded, as though hoping to peg ‘Neighbor Guy’ as another threat to his territory. Territory that Johnny had made it clear to Edgar that Jimmy didn’t have, but territory he defended nonetheless.

“He said some stuff about my keys,” Johnny said with a shrug.  “He had some other guy over with him; I didn’t really want to bother them.”

Edgar sat up a little straighter at the mention of the keys. He was sure that regardless of what Johnny was currently saying, he  _did_  want to bother them, and quite badly, in fact.  Edgar, for his part, really wanted to push about what Johnny had learned, what the key guy had said, if it had any connection at all to Edgar’s book, but thought it best not to discuss in front of the others if Johnny hadn’t.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Devi chimed in, waving her hands. “Did  _you_  stop in to see  _him_?”

Johnny shrugged again. “Yeah,” he replied. He had an air of nonchalance that Edgar suspected was fake. “I thought I’d stop in and ask him if he knew what all the keys went to, since I haven’t figured them all out. But, like I said, company.”

Devi appeared skeptical, but went back to a side conversation with Tenna about painting something after only a quick look of doubt in Johnny’s direction. Edgar sat nervously rubbing his arm, desperately looking for something in the room he could feign a giant interest in. All he wanted was something to distract himself from wanting to talk about the entire thing. Those pictures on the wall sure were funny. Yep.

He took a breath to say something that he hoped would be neutral, boring and generally normal conversation before Tenna sprung to her feet, clapped her hands together, and announced that she absolutely had to go to the sewing class today.

“I’m makin’ something NEAT,” she whispered dramatically when pressed for why. With little warning but a smile and the widening of her eyes, she tore out of the room and down the hallway.

Edgar blinked, and tilted his head to one side, staring at the door Tenna had left wide open. “You actually have classes to go to?” he asked.

“You don’t?” Jimmy replied as he stretched a leg over to kick the door closed.

“I did once,” Edgar said. “I‘d just been going to the same ones every year. Sometimes I talked to the teachers, you know, got them to notice me, and they’d ask me to run errands or something. But they didn’t seem to see me there unless looking for someone to run things to the opposite end of the school… After a while, I liked it down here, so I stayed to play and listen to the music from in here. I had no idea who I was, so couldn’t get a new schedule. Not that it would have mattered anyway…”

Edgar heard Johnny shift position behind him before he leaned over Edgar’s shoulder, looking at him curiously. “Did you want somewhere to be? Some classes, I mean? We can fix that for you.” Johnny held up his keys, a trace of a grin on his face.

Edgar arched an eyebrow. “I don’t see how keys could-”

“There’s one for the main computer,” Devi interrupted. “You just open the program, add classes, grades, whatever you want. You can be anyone you want on the school’s computer. Not that it really matters, but we did it. Just in case.”

“In case…,” Edgar repeated.

“Of emergency, please break glass,” Johnny finished for him, cutting him off and pocketing the keys once again. “We’ll set it up for you later.”

Edgar nodded, despite being fairly confused.  He had no idea what school records would help him with in the future if his life was going to be dictated by some guys hanging out in clouds and filling his basement with cardboard. Surely he wouldn’t need to attend some university as a divinely protected experimental man. Hell, prior to meeting Johnny’s crew, the ‘powers that be’ didn’t seem to think his current learning to be of much importance, let alone future plans of  _any_  sort.

For a moment, it seemed to Edgar that Johnny and his friends were better off than he himself felt, and he couldn’t pinpoint why. It was as though he was trying to look at everything from two points of view; his own, and those of someone who had never encountered these people - a real outsider. Anyone else would look at Edgar more favorably; he, after all, had a house and everything taken care of. Why would these people living off what the local high school had to offer be better off? Edgar knew the answer, really he did, he just seemed to like confusing and contradicting himself.  He knew to anyone outside his situation that he would surely seem to be the one better off, but in reality, when he looked at it though his own eyes, this group had gotten everything for themselves, and Johnny and his friends were actually happier than Edgar had ever been.

Not including this past weekend, that is.

It turned out that Edgar was quite honestly surprised for the rest of the day. All in all, the little group was close, and for the most part did average things, if just a little strangely. They met for lunch, which was always a turn-based ‘steal from the cafeteria’ venture. Anytime it was Devi’s turn, Edgar learned, she grabbed a salad for herself and Nny and generally ignored Jimmy. Tenna usually ate something in the sewing room, as it also doubled as the ‘Home Ec’ classroom. Cookies and various other foods suited her just fine for a meal, but if she did show up to the choir room then Devi grabbed a bag of cookies for her.

They all made vicious fun of each other, and sat around looking bored while listening to music. Occasionally, a song would spark a memory in one of them, and they’d all laugh at the injuries Jimmy seemed to have sustained during a past playing of every one of them. Something involving a baseball bat apparently happened the previous summer and Edgar guessed this particular incident was what the picture on the wall was from. There had also been some sort of foot injury linked to, and involving, a song about the price of fish. Everything was so normal, so daily. He’d expected them to have deep philosophical conversations, or talk about their Swiss Cheese memories, but there was no focus on it at all, not even a mention.

It had seemed that memories and his lack of them were all that was on Johnny’s mind over the weekend, and his friends here knew about the situation to some degree. If Edgar was here, and could fill in some holes for them, why was there simply no mention of it? Edgar thought, once, that he would bring it up himself, but he, like the rest of the group, fell prey to Johnny’s unspoken role as leader, and had changed the subject to something random and as far away from the concept of ‘remembering’ as possible when Johnny so much as moved funny. What he really needed was a half a minute alone with Johnny, to figure out what he was thinking.

The more Edgar pondered what Johnny was doing by keeping everything to himself, the more he felt like Johnny was staring at him all day. When the last bell rang, Edgar felt a bit relieved to escape from what felt like constant surveillance. He did find it funny that the whole group felt the need to stay together until the rest of the school let out, despite the fact that they could be anywhere they wanted to be and no one would say otherwise. He did it just to…

Right.

The bell rang, and he reached to pack everything up. He had taken a few notebooks out when Tenna, fresh from sewing class, had requested a game of hang man (The word had been ‘salami’ for reasons that only she seemed to find hilarious.), so he spent a little while trying to gather them back up. Devi made some remark about getting back to a painting on her walls now that she was sure it was dry, and Jimmy muttered something about cleaning, though Edgar doubted he’d actually be doing that from what he'd seen of Jimmy's trailer. Notebooks stashed, Edgar moved to leave the room, and turned to give Johnny a ‘See you tomorrow’ or something similar as Johnny waved to the others who had said their goodbyes already.  He turned to stare at Edgar.

“Right then,” Edgar started awkwardly, “well, I guess I’ll be off. Still have some cleaning to do, you know.” He could still hear the other three making their way down the hallway, still discussing Jimmy’s long list of head wounds.

Johnny continued to stare, but Edgar could no longer say for certain if Johnny was staring at him. He looked at the wall behind him nervously, before he made a move for the door, attempting to say a decent farewell. Johnny held up a finger, and Edgar stood still, waited. He then realized that Johnny was listening, not staring. The sounds from the hall faded, and the familiar empty of the hallways returned.

Johnny’s attention slowly drew from the sounds in the walls, and Edgar felt the focus return to him. Johnny pulled his keys from his pocket, and threw them on the floor between himself and Edgar. Edgar raised an eyebrow and shifted his grip on his bag, unsure of what Johnny was getting at. Johnny nodded towards the keys, and Edgar pointedly stared at them.  Johnny coughed once, then glared down at the keys.

“Johnny,” he told them.

The keys jerked towards Johnny, crashing into the front of his boot.

Edgar looked up slowly at Johnny’s face, trying to read his expression. “What the hell was that?” he whispered.

Johnny half-bit his lip, and shook his head, picking up the keys. “No idea.”

“When did you find that out?” Edgar set his bag down on the beanbag chair and held his hand out for the keys. Johnny tossed them over.

“Yesterday, when I visited the guy next door. Pepito.”

“What did he tell you?” So Johnny really  _had_  found more information than he let everyone think he had. Edgar turned the keys over in his hands.

Johnny shook his head slightly, and looked down at the toe of his boot. “Nothing, really. One of the keys is ‘special’ he says. The guy he was with, this … ‘Squee’ guy, said something about me killing people, but they wouldn’t tell me anything…”

Johnny was still talking, but Edgar couldn’t hear a word of it through the pain in his stomach. The moment Johnny had said ‘killing’ Edgar felt as though someone had kicked him, and hard.

“…was talking about security before, so I’m sure he- What?” Johnny had stopped mid-story to see Edgar having difficulty breathing. Edgar gasped and coughed a few times, held his hand to his chest for a moment, then shook his head.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Just … swallowed a bug or something.”

Johnny wasn’t convinced. “You know things too, then. And what he said was true, right? You  _aren’t_  going to tell me.”

Edgar bit his lip. “Nny… I can’t. I promised.”

“You promised to keep me happy, right, right. And what if knowing whether I had killed people would make me happy? What then?”

Edgar sighed. “Still. You answered this for yourself already. Then you worry about becoming someone else. I’m not risking it either way. Forget what he said, alright? Let’s focus on the keys. We can figure out why they do… well, that.”

Johnny rubbed his shoulder. He had been doing that frequently during the course of the day, and had complained of sleeping on it funny.

“Alright,” Johnny answered after a small silence, “let’s figure this out, at least. Here,” he said, taking the keys back from Edgar, “let me try something.”

He held the keys up in front of him, far enough away from the both of them that there wasn’t going to be any movement from anything either of them did. “Say my name.”

Edgar looked at the keys, and spoke as though doing some introductions.  _Johnny, meet Keys. Keys, this is Johnny._

“Johnny.”

Nothing.

They stood still, waiting to see if perhaps the reaction was delayed, but still, nothing happened. Edgar was ready to ask if they should try ‘Nny’ when Johnny raised his arm and threw the keys through the doorway and out into the main choir room.

“Again,” Johnny commanded.

“J-Johnny.”

“Like you mean it, dammit, come on.”

“Johnny.”

Still nothing. Johnny stood with his arms crossed, staring out into the room.

“Johnny,” he said angrily.

A horrible clanging and jingling erupted from the room as all of Johnny’s many keys attempted to reach him and slammed into the chairs they had fallen among.

“Fuck,” he spat when the clanging stopped.

“Somehow I don’t think they’ll respond to that, too,” Edgar muttered.

Johnny looked at him as though daring him to say that again and Edgar immediately regretted not paying more attention to what he was saying. Regretted it, that is, until he saw a trace of a grin on Johnny’s face.

“That would be a much cooler password,” Johnny said, smiling. “I’d much rather be yelling ‘fuck’ at my keys than my own name.” 

Edgar smiled back, grateful his comment had turned out that way.

Johnny cracked a few knuckles, then walked into the main room to fish his keys out of the chairs. When he found them, he sat cross-legged on the chair they had fallen under, and tried the experiment again.

“Johnny,” he said with the same tone usually reserved for ‘fuck.’

The keys pulled toward the office where Edgar was still standing, then resumed normal behavior.

“What did they do?” Edgar asked, sticking his head out of the door.

“They tugged towards you that time…”

Edgar left the office and made his way through the chairs to take the keys again. He took them, tossed them on an open spot on the floor, and assumed a spot beside Johnny on the chairs.

“Try it again,” Edgar said.

“Johnny.”

The keys slid some distance toward the office once again.

Edgar scratched at his chin as he stared at the keys. Something was leading them in that direction, and it wasn’t him or Johnny.

“What did they do at Pepito’s?” he asked, still looking at the keys.

There wasn’t a response.

“Nny?” He turned to see Johnny staring at him as though he’d grown a second head.

“You used to have…” Johnny started, pointing at Edgar.

“Have what?”

“A little goatee thing,” Johnny finished, poking Edgar’s chin, “there.”

“Oh? Heh… I don’t really remember much about myself at all… but… you… I remember that you’d have blue hair pretty often. Dark, but kinda blue. ” Hoped his face didn’t look as warm as it felt.

Johnny grinned, and leaned back on the chair, hands holding onto his ankles. “Blue, huh? I’ll have to try that. Nice memories there, Goatee Guy.”

“I expect to see that blue now.”

“As I expect the goatee.” With a nod.

“Yes, mother.”

“Fuck you.”

Laughing felt really good. The past weekend had felt amazing and refreshing and free because of how often he had laughed. And though they were sitting, currently trying to discover the secrets of some haunted keys, they’d managed to laugh over something as dumb as hair.  As difficult as all of this was going to prove to be, Edgar was grateful for the entire situation.

Or maybe just for Johnny. But he’d say ‘entire situation’ to sound less creepy. Yes.

“Anyway, now that we know you’ve got voice recognition on your keys, tell me what they did at Pepito’s,” Edgar said, when finished with his share of the laughing.

“The same thing they did here, they just pulled toward…” Johnny trailed off, and looked wide-eyed into the office. He suddenly leapt off the chair and dashed out of the choir room and down the hall. Edgar was stunned momentarily, but hopped off the chairs himself, picked up the keys on his way, and chased after Johnny.

Johnny was standing in one of the entrances to the school, in between two sets of doors, essentially in room made of glass. Edgar opened the door, and stepped in himself. Johnny’s face was plastered to the outer door.

“What?” Edgar asked.

Johnny peeled his face from the glass to look at Edgar.

“This doorway, it’s practically right beside the office in the building plans. Come here.” Johnny motioned for Edgar to stand closer to the spot where Johnny had left a forehead mark. When Edgar obeyed, Johnny stood behind him, chin on Edgar’s shoulder, and pointed out the window at a house with a weathered old porch.

“He lives right there,” Johnny said, jamming his finger tip on the glass.  “When we first tested the keys, my back would have been toward that house. While I was there, on that porch, the keys pulled toward the living room window. The keys react to his house.”

“They react… with  _your_  name… to  _his_  house…” Edgar attempted to process everything into meaning something, but nothing came. He thought it might have been easier if he could breathe, but his heart was busy pounding the air, and all coherent thought, out of him.

Johnny stepped back, and Edgar’s breath had a fighting chance once again.

“So now,” Johnny said, completely unaffected by what had nearly suffocated Edgar, “the suspicion lies more on him than it does on me. The keys lead to him. The people in your Heaven book want to investigate the keys. I wonder if it’s not me, but  _him_  that they don’t trust.”

Edgar continued staring out the window. The house was so unassuming, yet frightening and intriguing at the same time. Inside it lived people who seemed to remember who Johnny used to be… maybe, if Edgar visited, he could get more information out of them, information they wouldn’t tell Johnny. Then he could-

Thoughts were interrupted by the startled cries of two people slammed violently into each other, and Edgar whirled around to see Johnny and some bespectacled guy in a trench coat lying on the floor and both partly wedged in the door.

Edgar blinked at them for a moment, and watched them sit up. He was about to ask if they were alright when Johnny spoke up.

“YOU AGAIN?! What the hell is your problem?!”

Trenchcoat Guy fixed his glasses, and blinked up at Johnny, who had managed a sitting position. He looked stunned, as though he just noticed he was on the floor, then sat up quickly. He shook his head, and ruffled already crazily spiked hair, then stood up fully, brushing some dust from his pants.

“You saw nothing,” he said quietly, before spinning around and dashing down the hallway.

Edgar moved to help Johnny off the floor, but he was already standing up and brushing some dirt from his side.

“What the fuck is with that kid? That’s the second time I’ve seen him around, and the second accident he’s had in the process.”

Edgar held his hands up in case Johnny fell over or something, but Johnny seemed stable, so he let them fall to his sides again. “When did you see him before this?”

Johnny seemed fixated on a spot on his shirt. “Yesterday,” he said, rubbing the spot with his thumb, “he was standing outside that house, just staring at it. When he tried to run away he fell over. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Or, close to it, anyway.”

“What… what  _happened_  anyway?” Edgar still wasn’t sure how they’d managed to get stuck in the door.

“I started walking out backwards. He… I don’t know, was stupid and didn’t see me or something.”

Edgar started out the door himself, and held it open for Johnny to follow him. “Because walking backwards isn’t stupid or anything.”

“Quiet.”

They returned to the office and Edgar picked up his bag. He assumed that now that he wasn’t important to tell things to that maybe Johnny would want him out of his home. It didn’t seem so.

Johnny jumped up onto the desk, slid on his knees across it and poked a complicated combination of buttons on the stereo above him. Radio at first.

_“Give yourself to me_  
 _You hold the key...”_

_‘Are you in the market for a new home?’_

_“Is it that time again?_  
 _Wasn’t it already then?”_

_‘NOW FOR ONLY 3 PAYMENTS’_

Finally, Johnny got something working, and a strange accordion tune started to fill the room. Johnny sat down on the desk, and turned back to Edgar, who shivered a little.

_“Above all the silence, can you hear, can you hear_  
 _Above all the silence_  
 _laughing, laughing aa~ah_

_It’s so difficult to breathe, so difficult to bre~eathe_  
 _So difficult...”_

Johnny smiled happily to the song, but something about it rather frightened Edgar. Maybe because it wasn’t hard at all to see the old Johnny laughing to music that sounded so … insane. Was that the word? Maybe.

“Weird isn’t it? It used to be part of a musical about a town that was forever on fire. I imagine someone laughing while lost in the coal mines for some reason, and it makes me smile.”  Johnny closed his eyes as he spoke.

Edgar shivered again.

He was still creepy. No matter how much insanity was gone, Johnny was still a little strange and very weird in places. Edgar still felt captivated, still felt drawn to him, still was sure they were and could still be best friends. Happy visions of people laughing while they burn to death or not, Johnny was still…

There was that word again.

Still couldn’t say it. It was hard enough to realize he’d thought it.

“Hey, are you leaving?”

Edgar blinked, and refocused on actually  _looking_ at Johnny. “I… Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to stay any longer or not, I just-”

“You should stay,” Johnny said through a grin.

“Alright…”

“Besides, at night, when the school is cold and dark, is the best time to try out keys.”

_“Oh can you hear... the laughing?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song snippets are:
> 
> Madonna - "Frozen"  
> They Might Be Giants – "Am I Awake"  
> And  
> Squonk Opera – "Above All the Silence", from their musical Burn/Inferno


	10. La Mer

More music.

More empty halls.

More strange conversation.

Even the hallway to the choir and band rooms was strange and scary looking at night. Johnny obviously knew every turn, every crack in the floor, every slight grade in the hallway, but Edgar was a little less adept at navigating the shadows of the school.  They’d already been around most of the first floor in total darkness. He didn’t understand why they had to stumble around in the dark, and had tried to ask.

“Why don’t we get a flash light from the closet?”

“Are you kidding? That ruins it!  Careful, there’s a box there.”

Edgar had fallen on it anyway. In fact, it never mattered what was in front of him, or even how early Johnny warned him, he never seemed to get by anything without first slamming into the floor.

They were moving along a hallway he had never used aside from the day he tried to find Johnny. It was wide, and had doors on either end, so he had nothing to really run into, plus the glow of the vending machine on the end nearest the choir room helped with visibility.

“Nny, where are we going, exactly?”

“Over to the b- OH WAIT.  The gym is really great at night. We’ll stop in there first… you’ve got to see this.”

Johnny shuffled over to the right side of the hallway, and took out the keys. Edgar was about to bring up how useful the flashlight would have been here, but was surprised when the lock opened in seconds.

“Wha… How did you…?”

“What?”

“The key to the gym. How did you find it so quickly without a light?”

“I told you before; I always come out here in the dark. I learn the keys by how they feel. Our best sense isn’t always vision, you know. You might want to stop abusing it; I've been reading that humans as a species rely on it so much that our other senses are stunted. ”

Edgar stood still while Johnny pushed the gym doors open. A silvery light spilled out along the floor as the doors were eased wider and Johnny walked inside. There was a slam as Johnny locked the left door into an open position, then a pause before he stuck his head out into the hall way.

“Are you coming?”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry.”

The gym looked enormous when the bleachers were pulled against the wall, and while that was impressive, what Johnny had obviously wanted Edgar to see was the effect from the skylights. Half a dozen beams of light came from the ceiling, dissipating about half way to the floor, dust particles floating within them, leaving six pools of fuzzy, silvery light on the wooden floors.

Johnny made his way over to one highlighted spot, paused for a moment, and then dropped to the floor, staring up into the light. Edgar felt sort of stupid standing there just inside the door, so went to join him.

“It’s a bit too early yet,” Johnny said, still staring up and out.

“For what?”

“The moon. At the right time, it slides right past this spot. We’re still too early.”

“Oh.”

They sat for a while, watching the stars, watching the occasional stray cloud that passed by. Edgar wasn’t sure if he should say something about the time it would take the moon to sweep by or not. 

“Hey,” Johnny said suddenly. His voice echoed across the gym.

“Hmm?”

“Listen to this.”

Johnny held out his headphones, which Edgar was rather surprised to see as he didn’t remember Johnny having them when they had left the choir room earlier that night. Edgar also hadn’t been able to see a damn thing, so that probably explained why.

He put the headphones on, and was greeted to a soothing slow tune, something that reminded him of floating in the ocean, drifting on his back out to… somewhere. After some time, some percussion worked its way in, and Edgar thought he could make out some very faint words. But maybe not.

Then a buzzing. At the volume he had the music, it was deafening, and he winced trying to find the volume button on the CD player. Soon he could hear nothing but the buzzing, tensed up, and could  _see_  nothing but Johnny sitting calmly in the light from the night sky, seemingly oblivious to Edgar’s audio peril. Just when Edgar thought he would do something sensible and remove the headphones, the buzzing was gone, and he relaxed again. The soothing wave music was back, and words were definitely there this time; he could tell they were being spoken, but not what they were. Then everything slowly faded away, music, voice, any trace of buzzing. Only when the final pang of music was gone was he able to remove the head phones.

“The best part about that,” Johnny said as soon the headphones left Edgar’s ears, “is that you don’t really appreciate the sound of the melody until that buzzing stops. By then, it’s almost too late. It’s very rare that anything is really appreciated before it becomes noise. I like listening to that one in here, especially.”

“That’s…”  Edgar wasn’t really sure  _what_  it was. Well, he had an idea, but he had been avoiding that word as of late. It impressed him, though, at the very least. He almost felt like he had missed out on being blessed with the wisdom of the universe because he hadn’t lived in a high school. “That’s just-” he tried again.

“Shh, it’s starting!”

Edgar looked up to see the moon creeping into view in the skylight. It was almost unnoticeably slow, like watching an eclipse, but at certain points he became aware of how much progress it had made. Only when it was fully in the window, after what felt like hours later, did Edgar notice that Johnny was laying on his back watching it rather than sitting cross-legged at his side.

They may have been there an hour, they may have been there all night, Edgar hadn’t worn a watch, and he was sure Johnny didn’t own one. Surprisingly, it didn’t seem to matter to him what time it was, or what he was doing; he felt amazing.

When the moon had moved along enough to satisfy Johnny’s desire to watch it, he got to his feet, brushed his back off, and held a hand out to Edgar, who didn’t realize that he had also ended up on his back. He took the offer for help though, and surprisingly, given their difference in weight, didn’t pull Johnny down to the floor in the process.

Johnny made his way to the door of the gym without a word, and waited for Edgar to leave before fiddling with the latch to keep it open. Once closed again, he re-locked the door, and they resumed the trek down the hall.

It wasn’t more than a few feet before Johnny made a quick left, pulling Edgar with him. Just a quiet little offshoot of the hall, and Edgar wondered why it was there at all until he heard Johnny unlock another door. Yet again, light was visible, Johnny kicked the door stop and walked casually through. There was a high set of stairs directly to the left when he walked inside and Edgar watched Johnny take them a few at a time before following himself. The light was at the top of the stairs and turned out to be coming from a bridge to another part of the building. It was all glass, save for the floor and a strip along the roof, so the same light that had been beaming from the gym roof filled the area here and spilled out into what looked to be the second floor of the school.

“Why didn’t I know this was here?” Edgar asked, taking in the sight of the parking lot and the town lights far beyond it.

“You don’t spend enough time here?”

“Can people always get to this?”

“During the day, yeah.”

“Huh.”

Edgar looked out towards the elementary school, and saw the swing set on the playground shifting in the wind, lights from the rest of the town, cars, and the occasional plane. Why was it that he had never paid any attention to things like this before?

“You come out here a lot, Nny?”

“Almost every night, yeah. I like watching the sky, and I haven’t found the key for the roof yet, so this is as high as I can get.”

Edgar leaned on the railing, and fiddled with one of the locks on the window. He heard it click, and tugged at the frame. When he finally managed to pry it open, the breeze that had been playing with the swings rushed in and ruffled his hair.  The cars and the breeze made just enough noise to fill the space in the bridge, but not enough to be distracting. Edgar thought for a second about the buzzing from Johnny’s song, and hoped he appreciated the sounds of the city enough now that they would never become as deafening as the song had been.

“You never answered my question, Edgar.”

“Which one?”

“If you still had your faith.” Johnny was leaning on the railing now too, bits of his mess of a hair cut flipping in the breeze that occasionally ran through the window.

“Oh. That.”

Edgar took a deep breath of the rush of air that had come in through the window before he continued.

“It’s difficult to say, now. I mean, after what I’ve been through, I can’t  _not_  believe, because, well, he’s obviously up there, but it’s hard to… feel the same way about it.  And I’m not saying I was the world’s greatest religious guy by any stretch of the imagination, I just had faith in it being there. It was my perception of it that turned out to be a bit off, I suppose.”

“You seem to take that awfully well.”

Edgar laughed a little. “When it was first shown to me that I really had had great love for a system that didn’t care so much for me, I was freshly dead. After twice through that and then seeing someone you really cared about treated the way you were... it wasn’t so hard to accept that it wasn’t how I imagined it to be. I’m grateful that Heaven is there, I guess, but somewhere inside, I’m still disappointed that I have nothing to fall back on.”

“It’s better not to fall at all.”

“You’re not surprised at how they turned out to be at all, are you?”

“No. Not that I really give a damn one way or another, of course.” Johnny shrugged. “For me, it’s a stronger thing to do to fall back on oneself, on... something deeper than a deity. If you have enough strength to use your own soul as a crutch, nothing can beat you.”

“Chicken Soup.”

“Excuse me?” Johnny raised an eyebrow.

“You sound like one of those books. Those ‘self-empowering’ books or whatever they are.”

“Quiz tomorrow morning, smart ass.”

“Hilarious.”

“Thank you.”

Edgar sighed, almost content, and was about to talk about the breeze when he remembered that he had wanted to address something from earlier.

“I had wanted to ask before... about Pepito.”

“What about him?”

“You didn’t tell the others anything important. Hell, I don’t think you’ve told me everything, but...”

“I decided I didn’t want to tell them.”

Edgar took his eyes off the city and looked at Johnny, who was still occupied with staring out the window.

“Why? Isn’t ... I mean, aren’t the memories important to them, too?”

“Sure they are,” Johnny answered, as he traced some shapes on the window. “But I’m just as worried for them should they ever remember anything they shouldn’t. I don’t want them to change, and I don’t want to ... hate them for it.”

“Oh.”

“A little selfish, maybe?" Johnny laughed. "I’m not going to be offended if you think so; I think so too. I don’t want them to gain memories where I can’t, or become people I don’t like, so I’m going to keep it from them. I can sit here and pretend it’s something noble to do, protecting them from becoming other people, that kinda shit, but there’s nothing but my own motivation there. I figure I’m at least better off for recognizing it than going about it blindly.”

Johnny nodded slightly at the window. “Yeah, at least I know...” Trying to convince himself, maybe? 

Edgar focused on his reflection plastered over the city.  He might actually look more balanced with that goatee... He squinted at his image and then sighed for what felt like the thousandth time. “But you’re not worried about changing  _me_ , I see.”

“I’ve just met  _you_ ,” Johnny responded quickly. “I have nothing to lose so far, and if I grow to like you as you warp into someone else, then it becomes easier on the both of us.”

“And if you don’t?”

“I’m not really worried about that.”

“Alright then... So... what did he tell you? You know, since you’re not worried about ruining me and all.”

Johnny pushed his hand against the glass in front of him. “Stop talking to me like you assume I think you’re worthless.”

“It’s a worthy assumption when you’re worried about changing the kid you’d rather torture than actually befriend,” Edgar shot back, almost disgusted.

“Just stop it.  He told me the keys were for security. He said something about sides, he said the person I was going to talk with wouldn’t tell me anything, and you didn’t, a good call there, he said no one wants me to be what I used to be... he said one of the keys was special, he said...”

“Just one?”  Edgar felt all too comfortable with just letting the ‘ruining’ business go until later.

“Yes.”

“You think it’s just that one key that reacts to your name like that?”

“Odds are good, I would say.”

“So why haven’t you taken the ring apart?”

“What would I do with it, even when I saw which one it was?” Johnny rolled his eyes as he spoke.  “It’ll lead me to his house, and I’m finding it highly unlikely that he’d let me in after I came up to his door yelling, ‘Hey! I got the key! Let me traipse around your house and see what the hell it’s up to, kay?’ You know, just a feeling I have.”

“Point taken,” Edgar said, smiling at Johnny’s momentary rapid hand motions and stupid facial expression as he mimed asking hypothetical Pepito about the key.

They stood for a while, listening to the city. Edgar started to feel a bit drowsy, and the high from unlocking doors was wearing off. He found he nodded his head quite a bit when tired and it was when he smacked his forehead on the glass that he asked if they might keep moving.

“Maybe we can find the key to the roof?” he offered. Anything to keep him awake. Plus, he still had to walk home.

“Sure,” Johnny answered, taking the keys out again, and walked back towards the door they had come through. Edgar somehow thought the door would be far away, or right along the way they were headed, but it turned out they had been standing mere feet from it.

Johnny stood there, feeling the keys and Edgar smiled when he heard him rattling off the uses for each of them.

“Cafeteria... Art Room...Jimmy’s trailer...Devi...Ok, here we go. I don’t know what this one does.”

Edgar stood beside him, realizing that there was little excitement to be had in watching Johnny try each one of them, as he couldn’t exactly help.

“Not this one...” He paused before grabbing the next key to look over his shoulder at Edgar.  “You realize this is going to take a while, right?”

“Yeah...”

“Sure you want to sit through it?”

Edgar shrugged. “Can I try one?”

Johnny looked doubtful that Edgar would even pick one to try that he hadn’t already identified, but handed him the keys. “Here. Go to town.”

Edgar sifted through the keys, looking at each of them, even though Johnny had scolded him for relying on sight so much. _He_  wasn’t a genius teenager living in a school, how else was he supposed to judge a key? He took one that looked reasonable, and tried it in the lock. For a brief moment, visions of personal glory struck him. The door would open, Johnny would be thrilled, and perhaps hug him or something, and then...

And then the door would stay locked.

Johnny smirked and took the keys back.

“My turn,” he said, jamming another key into the lock. He rattled it and pulled at it, but still nothing.  He pulled it out sharply, huffed in annoyance at the lock, then held the keys in front of Edgar again.

“Alright, you’re up.”

And it went like that for at least a dozen trade-offs; back and forth, minimal conversation at best, as though picking a new key required immense concentration. After some time, Edgar had resorted to trying two or three in a row, while Johnny grew restless and paced around the bridge.

 Edgar found himself driven to getting this damned door open. He would open it, Johnny would memorize the key, and he’d forever remember that Edgar had found it. Edgar had found it for him, and wasn’t worthless, and it would be wonderful. It would be perfect. His moment of mental glory was interrupted by a small click, and the wind forcing the door open even as he held the handle.

“Oh.”  Fantasy over too soon - interrupted by the reality that should have caused it.

He actually heard Johnny coming from the other end of the bridge. Usually he moved in such a way that Edgar rarely heard him coming, but this time, Edgar supposed and hoped, excitement got the better of him.

“Which key, which key?!” Almost bouncy.

Edgar held the keys out; still surprised he had actually managed to find the right one. Someone would have done it eventually, he knew, but because it was something Johnny wanted, and  _he_  had done it, it felt significant.

Johnny rubbed the key between his fingers, then clutched it tightly, as though worried he might lose it.

The wind was the first thing Edgar noticed when he followed Johnny up the stairs to the roof; tonight had been exceptionally windy and Edgar could hear it whistling around all the nearby buildings. Next was that the roof was covered in gravel. He wasn’t expecting it at all, and couldn’t find any real purpose for it, but, as he had never built a school before, assumed it to be important somehow.

Johnny didn’t seem to pay any attention to the gravel, or even the wind. He had stood in silence for a moment when he reached the top of the stairs, then had run across the roof to the edge overlooking the city.

The view was nice, really, but Edgar just didn’t feel quite as affected by it as Johnny seemed to be. It was a building, and a skyline, that he had seen countless times from just sitting on a hill a few blocks from his house. Nothing special. He took his time walking over to Johnny, kicking some rocks, poking at lost and faded fluorescent-colored Frisbees that dotted the landscape. An old shoe had managed to get up there as well. An old game of kickball gone horribly wrong, it seemed.

As he drew closer to Johnny he noticed that Johnny seemed unable to take things in fast enough. He looked at the sky and no sooner had it seemed that he had found something to focus on then he looked out over the city. Back and forth, and trying to take in just a little too much all at the same time.

At that moment, he saw Johnny lean over the side wall.

_No problem there. What was he doing, letting all the blood go to his head?_

Then a foot lifted from the ground.

_Um._

And the other.

Edgar wasn’t sure when he got close enough to get such a hold on Johnny’s ribcage, and he also wasn’t sure how he was going to explain  _why_  he had a such a hold.

He wanted to imagine a long silence about now. What he got instead was his heart attempting to deafen him. He thought maybe if he didn’t make any sudden movements, Johnny wouldn’t notice. No, that was retarded. Johnny knew very well that he had an Average Joe attached to his person. Maybe if he pretended not to remember. Yes, that seemed to happen to him all the time anyway.

“Um.” Ok, Johnny could still speak. This was good. He hadn’t passed out from rage. This also meant he could still kill Edgar. To let go or not to let go.

“I... I thought you were going to...,” he let go, embarrassed, and finished, “...to fall.”

And there was that almost-but-not-quite-thanks-to-his-heart silence again.

Edgar thought that Johnny was going to ignore it as he turned back to the wall. Oh, good. Sigh of relief, no harm done. Edgar turned away for a moment, then looked back to see Johnny’s feet leave the ground once again, his hands braced against the bricks. He looked like he was ready to vault the wall.

And again, Edgar found himself attached to a doubled over Johnny before he could think rationally about it. He was about to apologize, and then he felt Johnny shaking. Did Edgar actually rescue him that time? Could Johnny actually have been... scared? Was this shaking a signal of visions of life flashing before the eyes?

“Um... Nny?”

The shaking got a little more violent, and Edgar thought he heard a sob.

“Nny?”

And then unrestrained laughter.

“TWICE?! You fell for that TWICE?!” Johnny’s words were drowning in his laughter. He struggled even to stand up.

“Here, wait, lemme try it again!” he was still laughing as he mocked throwing a leg over the side.  Something in Edgar made him lunge to stop Johnny, latching onto an arm, no matter how much a joke he knew it was. Johnny leaned onto the brick, holding his forehead in a hand Edgar  _didn’t_  have a death grip on, still laughing. He dangled an arm over the side.

“Wanna go for four?”

“That’s not funny at all.”

“Damn, you don’t think so? I think I’ll make a habit of falling off buildings now, since I’ll never have to worry about actually getting anywhere!”

“It’s still not funny.” A trace grin betrayed him horribly, but he maintained that it wasn’t a laughing matter.

“Sure, sure, okay.” Johnny rubbed his eye a few times, still a little giddy.

Edgar leaned on the brick beside Johnny now that he didn’t have to worry about him falling to his death. In a way, he almost wanted Johnny to have been in some danger so he didn’t look so completely moronic. At least Johnny would have been grateful. The roof had made him happy, but Edgar didn’t really have to put forth any effort to do that. There would be something.

Something.

God, Johnny was still snickering.

“What were you doing, anyway? Before I freaked out, I mean.” Get him away from the laughing, yes.

“Before you tried to snap me in half? Just looking.” Johnny continued to stare at the sky.

“What is it about the sky? Looking for something in particular?”

Johnny smiled. “Not really. Just...I kind of want to...” He extended his feet for a minute, standing on his toes. “Like...up. Sort of... yeah, up and over.” Johnny bounced on his foot once and made a sort of dome or diving motion with his hand.

“Nny, that looks like you want to bomb the city.”

“Shut up, you know what I mean. Not that that wouldn’t be fun too. I just want to... go up and over everything. I really like places like this, where there’s only sky above you, and anything that could possibly bother you is somewhere underneath.” He spread his arms for a second, but put them down quickly. Edgar blinked at him quizzically. “Nothing,” Johnny answered the silent question. “Just looked like an old stupid movie there for a second.”

Edgar got what he suspected was a completely stupid grin on his face and spread his arms entirely too enthusiastically, nearly hitting the side of Johnny’s face.

“I’m king of the-!”

“Yes, stop, or I’m jumping.”

Both smiling. It was completely stupid, but very few things that they had found amusing weren’t.  Might have been three in the morning, and Edgar was going to completely regret staying up this late later, but for right now, he was at least king of the roof.

“God, Nny, what time is it?”

“Mmm... Threee.... seventeen, looks like.”

For a moment, Edgar, in 'amazingly tired' mode, was going to attribute this fantastic reading the stars ability to the rest of Johnny’s talent for surprising him. Then he remembered the giant clock on top of the school. “I should... really go soon if I’m going to be here in the morning to sit with you guys again.” Edgar ran a hand through his hair, and felt the onset of a yawn, which he tried to hide by pretending it was simply extended inhaling. Probably not convincing.

“You’re going home?”

“Was I not supposed to?”

“No, no! I stayed with you, now you’re going to stay with me.”  He nodded for emphasis. “It’s fair or something.”

“Oh.” 

‘Stay with me’ really should not have shot his heart rate up. Shouldn’t have made him feel suddenly quite awake. Shouldn’t have made him feel anything but being dealt a convenience.  Shouldn’t have made him that much happier.

But damn if it didn’t anyway. He tried to ignore it.

Johnny was staring at him, seemed to be waiting for something. “So?” he said.

“So what?”

“I said, do you want to go back down, or were you planning on falling to your death when you fall asleep on the side of the roof?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think I’m quite ready to fall to my doom yet. I could stand to go back in... Take your time though!”  He added the last bit in on a quick thought; didn’t want to seem like a pushy guest in Johnny’s home. House. Something.

The walk back to the choir room was worse than the walk from. Now he was  _tired_  and disoriented. He crashed into things he was sure weren’t there, and things that should have been painfully obvious. (“Edgar, don’t get so close to the ... wall. Wow, are you ok?”) It got to a point that he was sure he’d need to be dragged back. He didn’t understand why it was an ordeal to get down the hallway, but it seemed so much longer now than it had before.

Finally, Johnny managed to lead them both back to the office, tore the beanbag off the stack of random things it was perched on, and pushed Edgar onto it.

“There,” he said, tossing the blanket from the basement into Edgar’s lap. He clapped his hands together once, and let his gaze pan around the room. He made an expression as though he spotted something he was looking for, and pulled the old worn blanket out from behind an office chair.

“Sleep ok,” Johnny said, looking back at Edgar.

“Not ‘Sleep well’?”

“Sleeping ‘ok’ is all you can do here, trust me.” 

Johnny shut the door to the office, and Edgar was left in silence.  As he drifted off, he thought he heard an ocean.

And the buzzing wouldn’t stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so this time, miraculously, there are no lyrics to speak of. Well, there are, but since Edgar can’t understand them, you don’t get that benefit either. The song, though, is La Mer, from Nine Inch Nails.


	11. Hallo Spaceboy

ohnny was completely right. There was no ‘sleep well’ in the choir room, and Edgar was now damn sure of it.

What he wasn’t so sure of was  _why_. Johnny more than likely had strange nightmares, or heard things all night that would keep him from a restful sleep, given his tendency to mimic his past self’s sleep issues. Edgar would have slept just fine here, given the circumstances, if only the room (and probably the bean bag) didn’t belong to Johnny. Something about knowing that Johnny was just outside the door, or that this place was home to all of Johnny’s habits and rituals, woke Edgar up nearly every hour, no matter how he yelled at himself that this was as normal as any other poorly planned sleepover.

Just in a school.

With the reincarnation of a madman.

Yeah, totally normal, no problems here.

He tried to pick out exactly what woke him up at around 5:30, after his fourth premature waking.  He wasn’t worried that Johnny would kill him - he was sure this Johnny was safe from those tendencies. He wasn’t concerned that Johnny would be found by someone as he was sleeping out in the classroom part of the room; Johnny was a veteran at hiding from the people who ran the school. He wasn’t even worried that Johnny had set him up to be bludgeoned repeatedly as he had apparently done to Jimmy at one point in time.

He really didn’t want to think that it could just be that he was so happy to get the chance to sleep there that he was, in fact, _not_  sleeping there. It was always good, he thought, to go over and over the reasons he was happy, too, just to make sure they were still valid and not in any way creepy. They weren’t creepy.  Edgar was glad to be given such great chances at this “making Johnny happy” thing; chances to make sure his life didn’t suck. That was it, and that was all. 

He rolled over and looked at the room. It looked strange in the almost light. It was the light that only exists from that time of the morning when you know the sun is going to rise  _soon_ , and you stare at it, and wait for it for so long that you forget to notice when the sun finally  _does_  rise. That kind of light was too new for the school. Normal people didn’t see it in such a light. Most people woke up just after that light was passed, when everything on Earth looked as though it had been made just moments earlier – they didn’t see it at school.

Normal people also didn’t go traipsing around it after midnight either, but he’d overlook that.

He discovered after staring into the light as it became a sunrise that he’d been muttering ‘Not creepy’ to himself for some time.  He shook his head and pressed his forehead into the beanbag. This was stupid. This whole thing was stupid.  What the hell was he even doing here? What did it matter to him what Johnny did? Why did Devi like the salads from the cafeteria? Where did Tenna live? Where were his glasses...?

Johnny woke him up two hours later, just before the first bell.

****

Wake up.

Yawn.

Blink for a few minutes.

Make random howling noise.

Morning ritual complete.

There were a few trace spikes of light poking their way into the room when Devi cast a glance at her window. It had been boarded up years ago, and for the sake of appearances she preferred to leave the boards up. Bright morning sun only served to remind her that she was still going to a school that she didn’t really have to be in, anyway. They would stop pretending soon, thankfully. Their collective rough math had worked to make this the last year. Edgar had joined them two years ago, and had been surprised when he was told that he'd done so much school dutifully on his own. Devi had laughed at him when he decided to stick around for those remaining years.

She stared at the dust particles floating through the shreds of light, before stretching and swinging her legs over the side of the mattress. It wasn’t much of a mattress, really, but it was better than sleeping on chairs or an old beanbag at the school.  Nothing in her place was much of an anything, but it was all there. A table that she Johnny and Jimmy had dragged out of someone’s trash pile sat in the middle of the large room she had adopted as her main living space. The table had been missing a leg, but with a large rock, a few stray nails, and a decently straight branch from a tree, it had been repaired enough to stand. Later, when they discovered that the table wouldn’t support weight, the branch was abandoned, and Devi used a pile of phonebooks collected from paper recycling bins as the new leg. There were nice attractive rock slam marks on the corner of the table top now, however.

Everything in the apartment that could conceivably be visible from the outside was kept as gray and moderately haunted looking as possible. If Devi was going to keep her home in the haunted apartment building, she had better ensure it kept right on being seen as haunted. A howl or two when she was feeling bored, and the occasional use of an old turn table from Johnny’s office had kept anyone curious about the home away for a few years now, and she hoped it would stay that way.

There was a sudden rumbling from upstairs as Devi began to get ready. The rumbling continued across Devi’s ceiling, seemingly traveled down the wall and stopped in front of her door where it was replaced with a slam and the other reason that no one set foot near her building -

“Mornin’ Devi!”

Tenna.

Sure, it could have been the thundering sounds that kept people away. Devi, however, was positive it was just this girl’s personality that repelled the rest of the community from this place. They could smell her crazy.

“Hi, Tenna.”  Still not totally awake. Still totally not ready for humans yet. Though maybe Tenna didn’t count as human, as Devi hadn’t kicked her out once in all the mornings she’d burst in. Tenna generally walked around like she owned the place, or at least co-inhabited, and of course this morning was no exception. She poked at the old sheets draped over the windows, asked loud random annoying questions, and was generally a pain. 

She was also the only person Devi would tolerate on a day to day basis. Even Johnny had stopped being this welcome.

“Hey, do you remember that one time?”  Tenna spoke presumably to Devi, but was too busy smashing the sheet covering the window into the glass with her forehead to bother facing Devi’s direction.  Devi ignored the window, and Tenna’s forehead, and worked on changing her shirt.

“Which time would this be?”

“When we almost got a lot of noodles.”

Devi stopped mid-tank top to attempt to process that before pulling the shirt the rest of the way over her head to focus properly. “What?”

“We almost had a lot of noodles that time, but Nny didn’t want to trade him for noodles, so we had to keep him.”

Devi had almost forgotten that Tenna had been the one to initially drag Edgar back into the clutches of the group, but that her motivation had been food.  Since then, he’d been around every day, often staying nights with Johnny in the school, with Johnny tailing him around on the weekends. Even the summer adventures they had traditionally spent as three, were now more frequently lived as four or five, depending on if Tenna showed up.

“Yeah, I remember,” Devi said, now occupied by thoughts of how Edgar had wormed his way into and changed what had always been. “Why?”

Tenna finally released her dominance over the helpless sheet, and blinked up at Devi. “Just checking.  Sometimes, I don’t think everyone remembers that he wasn’t there all the time. Did you notice?” Devi nodded, and Tenna continued much like she had intended to keep talking whether Devi noticed or not. “Nny sometimes says things to him that are sort of strange, or asks him if he remembers things that he wasn’t there for. I wanted to check. To make sure I wasn’t the only one who remembered that he came. That it was later.” 

Devi started working on pulling her hair up into something that would hide that she hadn’t bothered to brush it out this morning and threw a long sleeved shirt over the tank. It had started getting colder lately. There were days that Devi wondered if Tenna ever had deep thoughts at all, and then days like this when their thoughts were so in tune it sort of scared her.

*****

_“Hey, there he is again. I wonder if he’s ready yet...”_

_“Again? Would you please leave that alone? You’ve agreed to better ideas than this stuff. I mean, you could jus-”_

_“I don’t see you actively protesting.”_

_“Somehow I can’t imagine being affected. Just a feeling.”_

_“Did you just roll your eyes at me?”_

_“Quit staring out the window, I’m turning the pause off.”_

*****

As she approached the school, and the choir room, Devi heard everyone before she saw them. The group had taken a liking to pretending they were going to make music lately, and they were rather active this morning. A year or so ago, Johnny had decided (for the whole group, apparently) that maybe they should change.

“I think it’s time we get noticed,” he’d said.

Oddly enough, they had all already had some attraction to, and experience with, music of some type. Johnny already liked singing with Devi, and Devi also enjoyed slamming things, making drums fairly therapeutic for her. Edgar had his fascination with pianos and keyboards, and Jimmy had apparently managed to steal and play with a guitar for a few years.  They sounded completely foul at first, and for a while Devi refused to participate, letting Tenna stand with them and play the kazoo in their general directions instead.  But when given people with as little to do as this group, things had no trouble progressing rapidly, and Devi eventually gave in to the crazy little game.

She had shrugged it off then, and wasn’t really taking it that seriously now. It wasn’t like it was going to last.

She gave the stubborn choir room door a shove, some general effort, and finally managed to get inside. They’d stopped the music in the few moments it’d taken Devi to fight with the door, so she was greeted to bits of laughter rather than attempted music as she threw her coat on a chair.

She casually walked over to the others, and sat down. Johnny, Edgar and Jimmy were sitting in a small circle of chairs, with no indication that they’d just been playing anything. Johnny acknowledged her with a nod, but was still too mid-laugh to say anything. Devi assumed whatever had been so funny was better left between the three of them, as normally Johnny would jump at the chance to include her, and just waited for it to die out. It was more than likely something else yet again at Jimmy’s expense, and so wouldn’t be anything new and exciting anyhow.

Laughing finally over with, Johnny asked about Tenna, and where she’d gotten to.

“Oh, she’s around,” Devi shrugged. “I’m not worried about her. She’s a big girl - she can take care of herself.”

Obligatory caring over with, Johnny shrugged and turned to Jimmy, who looked a little too happy for the previous laughter to have been at his expense.  Johnny leaned forward on the chair as he spoke, a tendency of his that seemed to have developed recently.

“Okay, okay, one more time. Play it one more time,” he said, pointing at something beside Jimmy, traces of the earlier laugh still in his voice. Jimmy grinned and pressed several buttons on a cassette player that Devi hadn’t noticed when she walked in. It clicked and made a general fuss before he pressed one more button and something Devi recognized as what they’d played over the summer filled the room. The quality was awful, and they hadn’t had microphones or anything that would pretend to mask how completely clueless they were about making real music, but that didn’t seem to matter – Johnny, Edgar and Jimmy were all staring at the radio, as though waiting for something really amazing to happen.

The more Devi heard, the more she thought she remembered this particular session. She had been unwilling to practice with them until a little while after this song, but had sat through several ‘recording sessions’. The one in question here had been on a Saturday in July, and Johnny and Edgar had been late for whatever reason. Devi had bitched at them about it, but they’d both seemed reluctant to give an answer regarding where they'd been. Jimmy had been silent throughout, but the look on his face had spoken volumes.  They’d gotten it seemingly resolved, and got through a whole two and a half songs, when Jimmy couldn’t take it anymore. Yes, this was that time when...

“YOU SUCK, EDGAR!” came blasting out of the radio, well above the volume of the music.

Yes. That.  At the time of recording, the completely un-threatening exclamation had resulted in issues and stupid accusations flying everywhere and Johnny again telling Jimmy to “either play or fuck off.” Today, all three appeared to be convulsing as they doubled over on their chairs laughing maniacally at the outburst.  Even Jimmy, who had at first defended the outburst violently, was now taking great pleasure in the failed threatening insult.

Seeing that her friends were going to be of minimal entertainment this morning, Devi retreated to Johnny’s office/bedroom.  She flopped into one of the old chairs, and sat idly picking at its exposed stuffing.  She thought it was rather weird how well those three got along. They really shouldn’t. At all.  She held a substantial piece of the cottony filling in her hands, and tore at it absently as she thought about her companions.

Jimmy (she tore off a piece) was hyper active, clueless, a false ‘misunderstood,’ and oddly obsessed with Johnny’s existence. Still pimply, no matter what cures he stole from the Minit-Mart, and still as completely annoying as anyone could conceivably be. Or, that spot might be Tenna’s claim...

But she was a good sort of annoying, really, she-

Devi shrugged and let her mental dissection of her other friends continue.

Johnny (tore off another cotton clump) was secretive, manipulative, and often a bit of a hypocrite. He got angry and violent at little things, yet at other times was quiet, reserved and prone to assuming no one was going to understand what he was pondering anyway, so he shouldn’t bother sharing it. It seemed to be that Edgar had a unique talent for bringing Johnny out of whatever fucked up shell he was in, though Devi herself had done a little of that herself over time.

And then Edgar-

“Are you alright in here?”

Edgar’s voice interrupted her impending analysis of his character, and she tore the cotton in half in surprise. He raised an eyebrow at her, and collapsed into the beanbag he’d adopted the day he’d arrived. He’d long ago left random personal articles around it -seemingly slept there when he spent the night in the school.

“I’m fine.” Devi had absolutely no intention of being talkative company.

“You look distracted today.”  Edgar didn’t seem to get the whole ‘I’m not in the mood for this’ routine.

“It’s fine.”

“I saw Tenna this morning.  She said something about what nice noodles I’d have made.  I’m sort of disturbed that she still talks about that. Has she been okay lately?”  Still trying.

“She’s fine.”

Edgar sighed and reclined deeper into the beanbag. Devi watched him stare intently at the ceiling. He seemed to be trying to get her to prod him for information or an ‘Oh, Edgar, whatever could be wrong?’ No way.  She threw the cotton on the floor.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Edgar. Really, they got along quite well, and he often came to talk to her about some crazy thing he felt he had to do regarding Johnny. Something about making him happy and past lives and changing books and a whole other slew of things that sounded like one of those crazy Japanese shows that were all over the place anymore. Still, all the crazy shit aside, he wasn’t a bad guy, and Devi generally got along fairly well with him. She liked him, even.

Edgar stretched his arms towards the ceiling, took a deep breath, then let out a sigh, shifting once again into the beanbag. 

Devi rolled her eyes. This was a classic case of Edgar trying to look relaxed before he talks about something ‘important.’ Or else something that made him nervous. Generally, there was one topic, and one topic only, that conveniently fit both of those categories quite well.

“I wanted to ask you something about Nny, actually, if you had a minute…”

Johnny.

Of course it was Johnny. Was there ever anything on this guy’s mind BUT Johnny?  Devi had half a mind to think that Edgar really just had crazy gay fantasies rather than this fate of the world-ish business he liked to pretend that he dealt with.

“It’s fine,” Devi replied finally. Edgar relaxed a little.

“I wanted to know if, back before I knew him, if he’d been close to anyone.” Devi raised an eyebrow, and Edgar elaborated. “Just, if he’d had anyone that he deemed ‘special.’ Something like that.”

_Oh, let me tell you his favorite flowers and you can get some of those and some heart-shaped chocolate while you’re at it._

“Someone... ‘special’?”  Devi put an unintentional disgusted sort of tone on the word.

Edgar became a little defensive and seemed to be trying to make sure Devi’s thoughts were as far from impure as possible. Didn’t matter to Devi – she had no doubts that Edgar and Jimmy had some sort of twisted homoerotic rivalry going on, and Edgar trying to cancel out his random obsessing wasn’t going to change it.

“I thought about it the other day – I wondered if he had developed the same relationships the old Nny did.  Or, maybe ‘started the same relationships’ is a better way to put it.”

Devi stood up, and wandered to the side of the room to try to find something to occupy herself with while she listened to Edgar embarrass himself. Some random objects that Johnny had tossed on a shelf in the back of the room served the purpose quite well.

“And why are you asking me this?” Devi asked, idly petting a blue rabbit’s foot she’d found tucked behind some old records. “Why not talk to him? You guys are close enough for that sort of ‘bonding’ I think...” Tried not to snicker, and stood facing the wall.

“I thought maybe he had... well, you. I thought he might have...yeah.”

Devi grinned, looking back over her shoulder at Edgar. “Me?” She half laughed the word out. “You think Nny would have gone after  _me_?”

“He did once, so I just thought-“

“No. Just no.  We’re ‘best friends’ if you could even call it that. Just... no.”

Edgar sighed. “Well, what about-“

“What about what? You? Jimmy?” Devi caught the end of her finger on the chain attached to the rabbit’s foot, and spun it there. “Edgar, seriously. We’re friends, you’re great, and on rare occasions when I don’t feel like murdering all of humanity, we’ve had nice little talks, but, Jesus, talk to  _him_  about this kind of shit, okay?”

Edgar looked completely at a loss for words, and opened his mouth several times. As expected, no words happened.

At lunch, Tenna got Devi a salad.

*****

_“I see him with that other kid all the time. I think they spend the night with each other.”_

_“You’re starting to sound creepy.”_

_“That’s sort of in the job description.”_

_“You just sound like a stalker... Why is he still such an issue to you? Aren’t you just going to collect him after-“_

_“That other kid is theirs.”_

_“Oh. I guess he couldn’t tag along then, huh?”_

_“Not really.  I think this also means they’ve got an advantage, but I’m really... This is going to hurt them...”_

_“Do you think they know about the keys?”_

_“...”_

_“Um...?”_

_“Fuck.”_

_*****_

 

Devi returned from lunch to find Johnny sitting in his office, and Edgar and Jimmy out in the main room trying to sort out some little thing on a piece of paper, although it was just as likely that they were playing tic-tac-toe.  Tenna followed Devi to the door of the choir room, but was completely distracted by whatever Edgar and Jimmy were bickering over, and wandered off in their direction, presumably to see what kind of damage she could cause.  She brought the little skeleton squeak toy she’d made in her sewing class two years ago, and proceeded to use it for full scale annoyance. She swore one day she’d have them molded in plastic. One glorious day.

Uninterested in watching Tenna get eaten alive by the other two in the choir room, Devi went to sit with Johnny, who didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular. She thought she’d see if he’d been quizzed yet today.

“So,” she started.

“So,” he echoed.

Devi assumed her usual spot on the office chair and rubbed her thumb on an apple that had come with her lunch. She still hadn’t started eating it. It didn’t matter if she was focused on it. It wasn’t like she and Johnny ever had conversations while really looking at each other, so she didn’t see anything wrong with focusing her attention on the apple, and Johnny made no sort of protest.

“Have you talked to Edgar today?” she said, scratching at a dull spot on the apple.

Johnny shrugged. Devi really couldn’t see him, but she knew it was there. “Yeah, why?” he answered. “Something weird again?”

“Isn’t it always weird with him? He was asking about you today – about who you were interested in.”  Still rubbing the apple. Maybe she’d eat it at some point.

Maybe.

“’Interested in’? What the fuck...?”

Tossed the apple from one hand to another.

“He was talking about the other you, again.  If we weren’t obviously invisible to everyone here, I’d be taking all of what he says for complete insanity. I mean,” she put the apple down, “he’s always telling me how much you were like ‘old Nny’ one day or another, and something about a book, and... God, Nny, I almost wish I was in on your little game. At least I’d know what-“

“It’s not a game.”

“Oh come on. How long have you been telling us about your holes and empty places and how-“

“It’s not a game.”

Devi dug her thumbnail into the apple. “Nny, I’m not going to argue with you about this. Go talk to him or something.  Go fill in all those little holes of yours, then kindly come back to Earth and visit the rest of us.” She paused to rake a gash in the apple. “And tell him you’re interested in HIM, for fuck’s sake.”

She left the office, not really sure why she had decided to make a big deal out of something that hadn’t mattered for years, nor why she was suddenly not buying any of it. When Edgar first showed up, she had hoped she’d get in on the gig too. Johnny said he remembered her – maybe she’d remember him too. It would be fun.

But she didn’t.  And she was beginning to think she never would and this was all an elaborate scheme to ... something. She wasn’t even sure, and she really didn’t care. Walking directly over what did, in fact, prove to be a large tic-tac-toe game, she threw the apple to the floor, flung the door open and headed home.

The outcries of ‘What the fuck?’ and ‘Shit, where’d my x go?!’ were ceased with an abrupt slam of the door behind her.

****

Johnny sat alone in the office, unsure of whether to rage around breaking things, or write unpleasant things about Devi until he felt better.

She didn’t understand. All those years of being his closest companion, of being the person who had the nearest shred of understanding about him, and she suddenly leaves it all. He returned to the same conclusion he always did when he was furious with her: That she was bat shit crazy too, and just needed someone to make her look saner. Tenna fit that just fine and he must do it even better.

_“And tell him you’re interested in HIM, for fuck’s sake.”_

What the fuck. Where would she get crackhead ideas like that?

The more he thought about it, the more he knew exactly where she got crackhead ideas like that, but thought it best to continue pretending he’d done nothing to deserve it. Still, it was a stupid accusation, there was no conceivable way that he –

“Nny, what the hell just happened?”

Johnny turned to find Edgar’s head poked in the doorway. “What?”

“What happened to Devi? She just stormed out.”  Still not all the way inside.

Johnny stared at the floor for a while, and watched patterns before he looked back up at Edgar. “What did you tell her today?”

Edgar had moved to enter the room, but when Johnny spoke, he slid behind the door a bit more, perhaps using it as a shield. “I ... I asked her a bit about you, but-“

“What did you tell her?”

All the way in this time. Closed the door behind him, and leaned against it. Sounds of Jimmy and Tenna trying to piece together the lost tic-tac-toe pieces faded out.

“I was just trying to see how different things were from other people’s perspectives. I thought, if you had taken an interest in her at any point, it’d be a connection... Was she upset about  _that_?”

Johnny had climbed on his desk, and sat there, knees drawn up to his chin. “She doesn’t believe me anymore. She thinks it’s a game. It’s not a game. There’s something going on and she  _knows_  it.”

Edgar looked uncomfortable, like he forgot his line. “I don’t know...,” was all he could manage.

“I’m tired of this shit, Edgar. Something has to change. Something has to happen and I don’t know what it is.” He brushed some stray long pieces of hair from his face, and rested his head in his hand.  “We’re close, but we're only as close as we were two years ago, and we don’t know where we’re going or what we’re trying to find. I’ve got... fucking... keys.  KEYS. And I can say my name all I want and they’ll still do the same goddamn thing and ...”

“Nny, I-“

“And...”

“Nny-“

“GODDAMMIT.”

Silence.

For a long time.

 In a space like this should have been something like crying, or a lovely musical montage, or something else that happened in movies. Johnny’s life only ever involved B-movies if it involved movies at all. He wanted to be doing something, even in a B-movie. Something. Anything.  Performing some task that made him feel like he was going to get somewhere with memories, or Heaven and Hell, or figuring out life with Edgar and Devi and Jimmy in it.

Noticed.

He’d told them to get noticed. Was that really going to change things? Would that really help? The book would still list his name every time he set foot in Edgar’s door, and the keys would still pull towards Pepito’s house no matter how many people knew Johnny and his friends existed.

Edgar was still standing there. For a flash of a moment, Johnny felt like he had a line here. There was something he was supposed to say. Something he’d said twice before.

“Why...?” he started.

“Why what?”

“Wh... why are people... so...”

Edgar looked terrified. “Nny... no, stop. Don’t-“

“‘Unpleasant?’”

And there it hit him. Edgar should definitely be dead. He knew that from before, Edgar had told him that. But the image that matched that line was stuck so firmly. Edgar should not have even had a form to attempt to resurrect. Shreds and pieces and ribbons and broken lenses. 

No matter how close, there was a hole. Johnny spoke to Edgar, asked him why. Edgar hadn’t known. They’d talked about faith. Edgar spoke of faith, and Johnny had envied. Then the hole.  It was such a small frame of time, but whatever was in it had decided Edgar’s fate once.

He narrowed his eyes and focused on Edgar’s ankles. A flash of a restraint.

“Nny?”

Snapped back to Edgar’s face. Glasses broken. Shattered might have been better.

Johnny pointed vaguely at him.

“I...”

“Nny, no. Stop. This can’t be good, just ignore it. Let it go.” Edgar walked slowly toward him as he talked.

“You...”

“Nny. Please.”

“I killed you.”

Edgar looked as though he’d been shot. “Ohgodno.”  One word.

Johnny kept shaking his head, and the images kept flashing. He couldn’t tell if this was getting them out or helping them get in. He felt hands on his shoulders and then nothing.

*****

_“Do you think you should do something? That’s going to be messy.”_

_“That’s just the thing. They had me ‘lend him’ to them for a while. Everything would be done already if someone they had up there hadn’t made some request that he have life again. Of course they agreed to it, it gave them more time to find a counter.”_

_“I didn’t think they knew...”_

_“I didn’t think so either. Shit. I didn’t want this to have to be difficult. Toasting the souls of the damned - fine.  Sorting out the borderliners – fine.  Make this random kid miserable? I don’t –“_

_“You completely suck at this job, Pepito.”_

_“Fuck you.”_

_*****_

Devi arrived home, and collapsed on her couch.

Minutes or hours or days later, a CD was flung under her door. She rolled her eyes once, but went to pick it up. Tenna, no doubt.  Last summer, she had been convinced that Devi needed to get out more, and that Devi needed to be happier. Since then, she’d burn music at the computer labs at school to get Devi to cheer up. The music never did much for Devi so much as the sentiment did.

She put the CD in, and skipped through the tracks. The YMCA.

_God, Tenna, you could do better than that._

She continued through the tracks.  All peppy disco and bouncy bubblegum pop. Ugh. Then one that wasn’t... well, it wasn’t quite anything. She had to have found it in that office.

_“If I fall... moon dust will cover me...”_

Devi raised an eyebrow.

 _“Spaceboy,_  
you're sleepy now   
Your silhouette is so stationary  
You're released but your custody calls  
And I want to be free  
Don't you want to be free...?”

Free? There was an interesting concept. Sure Tenna, okay.

 _“Do you like girls or boys_  
It's confusing these days  
But moon dust will cover you  
Cover you  
  
So bye-bye love...”

 

Devi yawned. Johnny’s head hurt. He could see shapes that reminded him of dead people. People who were and weren’t dead.

 _“..ove_.  
 _Hallo Spaceboy._  
 _This chaos is killing me._  
 _Hallo Spaceboy.”_

People were talking. “Earth to Nny! Nny?”

_“Ground to Major, bye-bye Tom_  
 This chaos is killing me   
 Dead the circuit, countdown's wrong   
 This chaos is killing me   
 _Planet Earth, is control on?”_

Confused. How were they still alive? Who were they? Why did they die?

 _“So sleepy now_  
Do you wanna be free?   
Don't you wanna be free?   
Do you like girls or boys?   
It's confusing these days   
But moon dust will cover you   
Cover you   
So bye-bye love   
Yeah, bye-bye love   
Hallo Spaceboy”

‘Boys or girls,’ huh? As though that meant anything. That was ridiculous. Someone doesn’t come from space to be asked who they want to-

 _“You're sleepy now_  
This chaos is killing me   
This chaos is killing me   
So   
Bye-bye love   
Yeah,   
Bye-bye love   
Do you wanna be free?   
Yes, I wanna be free”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Nny are you okay? Nny, look at me!”

Eyes. Edgar. Jimmy. Devi. Tenna. Fell.

“Nny do you-“

_“Do you wanna be free?”_

“Yes.”

  
  
  
 _“Do you like girls or boys?”_

“Yes.”

Tenna needed to find some different music.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song is David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Hallo Spaceboy.’ It combines elements of ‘Major Tom,’ which just blended so well for this, since another version of ‘Major Tom’ was made by my Peter Schilling, who did another veteran SWAN song, Error in the System from SWAN 8.


	12. Augen Auf

_Well, fuck._

His head hurt, and he wasn’t sure he was seeing quite clearly, but Johnny figured if he could still think in terms of ‘fuck,’ he was okay. Something was wrong, or some screws were a little less than tight, but he was okay.

_“...Ich kann nicht mehr länger warten  
Denn ich weiss was du verlangst”_

There were people talking at him. Not to him – he wasn’t picking up any of it, nor was he paying any real attention.  Devi was back, though, he figured that much out. She had just left, hadn’t she? Even Tenna seemed to be trying to get his attention.

_Well, fuck._

People started fading away.

_“Eckstein, Eckstein, Alles must versteck sein..._

 

Were they leaving, or was he losing... no, they were leaving. Some of them, all of them, one of them.

  
 _“Eins..., zwei...,”_

 

One of them still there. Okay.

_“drei..., vier...”_

 

One. One that should be dead. One that he...

One that he...

_“fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn!”_

 

“...KILLED YOU!”

_“Augen Auf – Ich komme!”_

Johnny sat up with a sudden outburst. He glanced at Edgar, who was sitting beside the desk where Johnny had been lying with a startled expression on his face.  He stayed rather shocked as Johnny’s gaze darted around the room, panting as though he’d just been doing a lot of running.  

_“Augen Auf – Ich komme!”_

He was in the front part of the office – the section that had actually been used by the choir teacher so many years back. There was music coming from Johnny’s ‘room,’ in the back, and Johnny suspected it to be Jimmy’s doing. 

_“Augen Auf – Ich komme!”_

Johnny found his hands oddly compelling, and discovered himself staring at them as though he’d never seen them before. They felt dirty. Then he remembered Edgar.

_“Aufgepasst - ich komme!  
Zeig dich nicht!”_

“Edgar,” he started, his voice a little unsure.

_“Ständig ruf ich deinen Namen”_

His head didn’t seem to be able to catch up to his words. As far as his mouth was concerned, he was already well on his way to conversing with Edgar, but his head didn’t seem to be able to turn fast enough – couldn’t find Edgar’s face. Things were leaving trails of afterimages no matter what direction he turned his head.

_“Ständig such ich dein Gesicht”_

Edgar had stopped looking shocked when Johnny was finally able to look at him. Afterimages faded, and Johnny was able to focus. The expression now was more concern mixed with a little fear. That and he looked like he might cry.

“Nny, are you-?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“L...liar.”

_“Wenn ich dich dann endlich habe  
Spielen wir Wahrheit oder Pflicht”_

There was silence between them for a long time after that.  The song Jimmy was presumably pretending he was performing still played in the background as Johnny and Edgar contemplated.

“So I-“

“I failed.” Edgar interrupted.

“What?”

“I failed.” He sat slumped in the chair, staring at something vaguely on the floor, and ran a hand through his hair. Johnny watched him take off his glasses, but didn’t speak to him.

“I was supposed to...” Edgar rubbed his eyes, pausing for a moment, “...was supposed to keep you from...”  He seemed to be avoiding saying too much. If Johnny knew Edgar’s personality by now, (and he was fairly certain that he did) he could reasonably guess that Edgar was still trying to determine how much Johnny knew.

“I killed you.”  That should clear it up.

Edgar remained silent, though Johnny thought he heard something in his breath.

“That was one of those parts... the ones that I wanted forgotten?” Johnny tried.

_“...Alles muss versteckt sein...”_

“Yes. And- And god,” he ran his hand through his hair again, “the rest will be even easier to remember now. I... I really thought...”

Johnny rubbed his arm, and let his attention focus on some gnats flying around the lights above him. He’d killed Edgar.  Hell, he’d killed, period.  Would he do it again? With just this tiny piece filled in, the rest of the holes seemed a little less fuzzy, and for the first time, he didn’t want them to be any clearer. 

Edgar was shaking in the chair beside the desk.

Trying to remember how to stop remembering, Johnny pulled his legs to his chest, and pressed his forehead into bony knees. There had to be a way of preventing this from getting worse.  Bursts of color swimming before his eyes as he squeezed his eyes shut too tight started to look more and more like objects and things in the room more like blobs.

Memories were overlapped in what used to be the hole where Edgar had died. Before there had been nothing, now there were two distinct scenarios. Edgar torn and shredded beyond recognition in seconds, and Edgar completely unharmed at the same time that he should have been dead. Something was trying to help one memory win over the other, he was sure. What he wasn’t so sure of was whether it was his own desire to keep the memory of Edgar actually living as the dominant one that was doing the fighting or not. It seemed that if it was something he wanted so badly, he could easily destroy the image of Edgar’s death, yet it felt more like something was fighting to get him to remember that he had...

_‘Nothing solidifies something in the memory so much as the wish to forget it.’_

Someone had said that once, and Johnny had visual confirmation – memories superimposed, fighting each other.

The more thinking he tried to do, the more he realized that he wouldn’t be able to do any thinking until all of this set in. And that as soon as it set in, he wouldn’t be nearly so calm... Looked like it was going to be taking a while.

Edgar looked like he might be crying when Johnny picked his head up again. Or else laughing until he couldn’t breathe, but that didn’t seem too likely in light of the whole, “I killed you” situation. Edgar looked up, and confirmed that there had been at least a few frustrated tears.  Johnny was fairly sure he would end up doing the same if he didn’t try to lighten this somehow, but there wasn’t a way.

This was it. He was going to lose himself piece by piece. Right here. Like this. Bit by bit, and anything that anyone could say to him could trigger it.  He’d done this before, this little remembering, but before, it had never been anything but things he had wanted remembered – favored hairstyles, favorite foods, or funny stories about teasing pre-teens at the mall. Edgar had always said that Johnny had agreed to everything if only he didn’t remember all the shit from the life he’d just led.  What happened now? Johnny was remembering ‘all the shit’ now – would the deal be off? Would he really lose everything in that he would slowly be replaced by this other person, and then, when he remembered everything, and was no longer even the person he’d become in this life, drop dead from a bargain not fulfilled?

“Here lies Johnny,” he muttered to himself, trying to laugh, “We’re not sure which one.” Somewhere in his office, his keys slammed themselves against a wall, and startled Jimmy.  Jimmy swore, hit something, and the song that he’d had on repeat for sometime now skipped a few beats.

Songs. Something stirred in him when he thought about songs. Something...

“You’re not going to die.”

Johnny looked back at Edgar, torn from staring into his office. “What?”

“You’re not going to die,” he repeated, “I’m not going to let you. I was supposed to be making you happy somehow or other. I want to keep his wishes, and my own word, as much as possible, of course, and I ... really don’t want you to become him...”

Johnny nodded.

“But if I focus on that,” Edgar paused for moment, then corrected himself. “...if  _we_  focus on that, then no one is happy. And that’s not why I’m here.”

“You’re not on a mission from God, Edgar.” Puff of breath that could be construed as a laugh.

Edgar smiled weakly, and put his glasses back on. “I might be.”

“Careful, I could be sent from Satan.” Johnny made half-assed spooky hands at him.

“You know, you’re... well, you’re taking this a lot better than...”

Johnny shrugged, and brushed a stray piece of hair from his face. “How long have I spent telling you that we were different people? I... Fuck, of course I’m not thrilled, but it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me, and I refuse to think it was you either. I mean, hell, it’s not like I was a complete homicidal maniac or anything, right?”

Edgar coughed.

“...Well, I didn’t rape you, at least,” Johnny offered. “That’d be more Jimmy’s style.”

He’d hoped that Jimmy would come in and bear being joked at, but he didn’t seem to have heard Johnny’s comment as the music continued uninterrupted, and was now interspersed with Jimmy’s voice singing in badly mangled German.

“So,” Edgar started, “did you ...” he made a circular motion with his hands, trying to call the words out as he spoke, “...hear us or anything? We were all talking to you for a while after you... We even called Devi back, you know.  It looked like you saw her, but we didn’t know.” He rubbed his finger on the edge of the desk, pretending to look for dust he should’ve known wasn’t there.

“Sort of.  Mostly, I saw that you... really should have been dead.  Even now, looking at you, I get flashes. And I felt like... maybe you all should have been.” Johnny watched as Edgar bit his lip, but when he didn’t reply, Johnny continued. “I heard a new song. You guys were like static for a while. Like someone turned on channel 300 in my head, and it’s all snowy, you know that white fuzzy shit, but it’s someone’s local weather channel underneath, so it’s playing ads, showing the temperature and playing crazy music. That sorta thing. Like how that one channel we watch at home has the Home Shopping Channel underneath it. You were under the song.”

Edgar leaned back in his chair. “Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know. It’s an old one too, from the bottom, I think. Maybe someone played it recently, and it came back up enough.” Johnny shrugged. “Or maybe I just needed it.”

“What was it like?”

“It kept... asking me questions.”

Edgar tilted his head. “Like?”

“It’s not important. The answer was yes though. And the song’s old enough – I should be able to find a hard copy somewhere...” he trailed off, then looked at Edgar, as close to truly smiling as he had been since he woke. “Did you ever get used to this?”

“The collective music collection?” Not the best wording he could have come up with, but considering what he had just endured, Edgar didn’t care if it sounded stupid. “Sort of, I guess. It took a while. I hadn’t really spent time with music that didn’t come from my keyboard before I found you. Though I guess it’s how I managed to find you. You mentioned needing the song – maybe people give off their own songs, and I was just looking for the right one.”

Johnny laughed at him. Of course.

“ _Augen Auf, ich –”_

“And it knocked you out, you loser. Nice job.” He tried to slide off the desk to go see if Devi was in the other room, or maybe to tell Jimmy that he couldn’t sing the whole song with ‘aunnnnoffffish COMMA!’ He didn’t make it. He felt something slip, he saw the wall flash by, then the ceiling, then part of Edgar and everything was black.

_“-Komme!”_

His brain had elevator music.

*****

All things considered, Edgar thought the situation wasn’t too bad. Johnny wasn’t freaking out, or rapidly degenerating into insanity like Edgar had feared, so randomly blacking out wasn’t so bad at all. Not to say that he wasn’t upset, or wasn’t concerned, because that wasn’t the case at all, but this was certainly better than the alternative. Jimmy and Devi had both heard Edgar yell when Johnny fell off the desk, and were now standing around in silence. Once the initial panic of ‘Oh god, did his heart stop?!’ was over, and Devi was able to confirm that he was alive, there wasn’t much else to do but to sit and stare at him.  There was the option of trying to wake him, but even Edgar didn’t want to do that to him.

“Maybe he’ll find a new song,” Devi had reasoned.

This was something new for Edgar. In the time he’d lived this life, he’d still never figured out how long after his prior life this current life had begun. It could have been the next year, or it could have been 300 years, and he really had no way of knowing.  The technology all felt relatively the same, so that gave him somewhere to place it, yet he still was unsure. The greatest confusion was music.

Edgar hadn’t noticed it through his whole life prior to finding his friends in the choir room because it simply wasn’t something he cared about, but new music was rarely made in this time.  Some time ago, (Jimmy and Devi had said that they could not remember a time when it hadn’t been this way) music became something in everyone’s head and  _in_  everyone. At some point, the people developed and tuned the ‘collective unconscious’ that psychology students had been taught about for decades, and music sort of flowed there. Artists at the time saw that sales of albums completely dropped out when everyone learned all they had to do to hear their favorite songs was call it up from the collective pool. Because of this, one by one, artists stopped making new music. The music that played on the radio was old music – music that had been around in the time when music could still make money, music that existed on hard copy somewhere.

There were three types of music in this world, as far as Edgar could tell. There was ‘Middle’ music, which was the music that lived in the people’s collective mental pool. These were songs that were being created or sung often when this mental thing first came into being. People developed a sense to know who the song was by, and who, specifically, that person was. The more popular or more recent a song, the closer to the ‘top’ of the pool it was. Stuff that was a little obscure or wasn’t insanely popular was said to be in the ‘bottom.’ Songs remembered from before the pool era were here. When a person died, their music was weakened in the pool, and would sink without new revival. For this reason, another classification of music came in.

‘New’ music was still a very small collection. This was music that artists who started out at the beginning of the ‘pool’ era had created. They saw what happened when an artist died, and that the best way to preserve a song was to record it somehow. So, for several years now, the first new CDs were being released, but only after an artist had died. So, even though the CDs were new releases, the music could be twenty years or more old. Edgar guessed that the only way to make money in the business was to die. Unless you made dance music. Dance music, love songs, and musical soundtracks – songs you needed to be able to enjoy with other people, and thus outside of your head – were recorded on CDs as they were made. Bands and singers seemed to want immortality now more than money.

Then, there was ‘Old’ music. This stuff was at the very ‘bottom’ of the pool, if it was there at all. This was also all of Johnny’s music. All of his songs were on tapes, CDs and records in that office – some re-recorded and thrown on mix tapes over and over. It had taken Edgar a long time to recognize  _how_  old the music was at first. He had forgotten that he simply hadn’t been dumped back into the same time period, and music that he had recalled hearing on oldies stations while growing up the first time wasn’t even going to be considered and ‘oldie’ anymore. It would be an ‘ancient’ if it was still around at all.

There was still a lot to understand about it, but Edgar had managed to realize a few things about the situation when he had the time to think about it – like now when he was staring at Johnny’s sleeping form on the desk. First, that when he’d first found Johnny and had passed out unexplainably, it almost had to be an Old song reacting in him the way it would react in anyone. The Old music does strange things to people subconsciously. It had a different effect on everyone, and depending on some factors that Edgar hadn’t quite worked out yet, could be overpowering to completely unnoticeable. The rest of the school wasn’t affected since they didn’t exist the same way Johnny did. Johnny was near invisible, just as Edgar was, so Edgar was able to pick up on it. Maybe Johnny had been looking for him, too. Maybe people really did give off songs and Johnny was just trying to mess with him. He never really brought that up with Johnny before, but he figured Johnny had better reasons to play the Old songs. They did different things for different people and Edgar suspected that to Johnny they were like some sort of drug.

Or else they were his escape.

This was the other concept that Edgar had entertained ever since Johnny had told them to ‘get noticed.’ If people knew where music was coming from, down to the exact  _person,_  then forming a band, and making music good enough to flow out of the group and into the public unconscious, would make sure  _everyone_  knew who they were. This explained why Johnny’s version of getting noticed hadn’t been to cause twenty-car pile-ups in the intersection in front of the school or to see how many other teachers he could get fired. Because music was so deeply tied to everyone in this time, not just to Johnny and his friends, as Edgar had previously thought, that  _no one_  would be able to ignore that they existed.

The group still sat in silence, staring at Johnny who was remained passed out on the desk.  Edgar hadn’t yet mentioned what exactly was causing this, and wasn't sure if he should.  He felt they had a right to know, as Johnny was just as much their concern as his, but there was the chance that they would knowingly remind Johnny of what he had done in a moment of spite, and Edgar didn’t want to risk it.

“So.”

Or maybe he’d have to.

Jimmy had been looking thoughtful for some time now. It was only a matter of when he was going to spring whatever he’d been mulling over on Edgar, Devi and Tenna.

“So what?” Devi asked.

“So he just... fell over, huh?”

“God, Jimmy, could you jus-” Devi looked prepared to launch into something she had more than likely prepared for just such an occasion, but Edgar held up a hand, and cut in.

“It’s fine, Devi, let him go. And no, he didn’t just ‘fall over.’ He’s... been having headaches.”

“You expect me to believe that? Somethin’ weird’s going on with you two again, I know it. You know everything and you’re just not telling us anything!” This was turning into another one of Jimmy’s standard lashing out speeches.  “Is this some other thing from your secret  _book? Is it?!_ You two do this shit all the time, I can’t fucking-”

“Shut up, it’s not about that!” Edgar rubbed his forehead a few times, trying to make sure he could piece things together as best as the situation would allow. “It’s... not that. I wish you wouldn’t think that I’m trying to do something backwards or underhanded to you guys every god damn time Nny does something that’s normal for Nny.”

“Passing out is normal in your world, Edgar? Did you train him to do that, or does it come naturally?!” Jimmy gestured wildly towards Johnny on the desk.

“I’ve told you a million times that I’m not TAKING HIM FROM YOU!” Edgar shouted, furious. “Still, it’s hard for me to take something that  _didn’t belong to you_  in the first place!”

Jimmy moved to do something, and Devi moved in front of him, visibly irritated, but quite calm.

“That’s enough. Shut the fuck up, both of you. Edgar,” she said, glaring in his direction, “you  _do_  owe us some explanation. This book shit and you two with the weekend visits has been going on for ever without any inclusion for the rest of us. Now this. We deserve to know something by this point. And YOU,” she spat at Jimmy when he snickered, “have been told the same fucking thing for how many years now? I don’t know how many people have to tell you that Johnny isn’t your special thing to put in a box and look at when it would be convenient to get you off before you’ll get the fucking hint. Knock it off. Everyone is sick of hearing it.”

Edgar felt some muscles relax, and watched Jimmy ease up as well. Devi glared at them both, and stepped back. Tenna had been leaning against a wall the whole time, either absorbing it all deeply, or blissfully unaware, so had yet to say a single thing. Devi crossed her arms and nodded her head in Edgar’s general direction.

“Go on, let’s hear it.”

Edgar sighed. “What... what do you want, exactly?” he asked, hoping to get some sort of direction for these confessions he was supposed to be making.

“We want to know what’s going on. We want to know what’s wrong with Nny. We want to know what you did to him, if anything. We want to-”

“Yeah, we wanna-”

“Jimmy. You are shutting up now.”

Jimmy glared at her, grumbled something, but leaned back obediently against the doorway to Johnny’s room, mostly silent.

“It’s really complicated,” Edgar offered. “I don’t even know how to explain everything myself, and even if I did, you’ve already told me you think everything’s bullshit. I told you about the book, you’ve seen Johnny’s keys... Well now... now he’s remembering. That’s what’s causing, well, this.” He made a half toss of his head in Johnny’s direction. “He’s remembering more than ‘my favorite food is cherry’ now. It’s... dangerous things, to be honest. And I think it may be even more dangerous to tell you two – three- everything regarding it.”

“Thanks for the trust, you bastard.” Had they been outside, Jimmy might have spat to punctuate his words. Devi let him speak, probably because she was thinking along those same lines. “Just because he’s not mine doesn’t mean he’s yours. Me an’ Devi deserve to know what the hell is happening to him as much as you do. Stop being a selfish prick and tell us what the fuck is going on.”

“It’s not selfish! I’m worried about Nny’s sanity, not about how many little secrets I can keep from his fan club!”

There was a general mumbling from the table, and the argument was forgotten for a moment as everyone turned to look at Johnny who was just beginning to sit up on the desk.

“You guys... talk too fucking much.”

After a moment of hesitation, Devi moved to stand at the end of the desk, and looked at Johnny, who still appeared very groggy. “What happened?” she demanded.

Johnny blinked a few times, and stared at her.

“Nny. What the fuck is going on? What  _happened_?”

“I think you lived,” he replied, half-smiling at her. When she faltered in her response, he leaned to his right to look around her at Jimmy. “I don’t think you did though,” Johnny said through a smile and part of a laugh. Jimmy looked a little ill, but mostly confused, and opened his mouth to say something, but Johnny had already stopped looking at him.

Johnny slid off the left side of the desk, his usual movements and mannerisms replaced by either lethargy or some sort of sleep-drunkenness. He seemed to slither over to Edgar, an expression on his face that Edgar couldn’t tell if he found familiar.

“And you, Edgar,” Johnny smiled, twisting a few fingers into Edgar’s shirt, “you did  _both._ ” Johnny pulled on the shirt, jerking Edgar’s eyes down to be even with his own. “Do you remember both? Either one you particularly  _prefer?_ ” His tone had a fake sort of sugar coating on it. “They were both so  _well done_  don’t you agree?”

Edgar thought he would be sick.

“It’s okay, you can tell me later...” Johnny’s fingers still wrapped in part of Edgar’s shirt, he pushed Edgar against a stack of cardboard boxes that were piled by the wall. “After all, we’ll be spending the whole weekend doing fun things with each other, won’t we?”  The sugar coating was melting away, and the grip on Edgar’s shirt tightening.

“Since you, of course,” at this point, Johnny let go of Edgar violently, nearly tossing him off balance, and turned quickly to Jimmy, “... have a CLAIM TO ME!” He glared then at Devi. “SINCE I AM SOMETHING YOU CAN GOVERN AND VOTE ON, RIGHT?! COMMUNAL PROPERTY?”

Edgar winced at every syllable, and assumed everyone else involved did too. He wasn’t even sure if Tenna was still in the room at this point.

“Did you not think for a moment, Nny,” Devi said, her voice calm, but shaking with anger underneath, “that perhaps WE,” she motioned to herself and Jimmy, “are just as concerned as Edgar? I don’t give a damn what you do with him, or Jimmy for that matter, but at the same time if you’re going FUCKING NUTS, then I’d like to HEAR ABOUT IT!”

“I’m not  _going_  fucking nuts... I’m  _remembering_  fucking nuts. I already went nuts; I’m just heading back for an encore now!”

“God DAMMIT, Nny. Just tell us what the fuck is going on. I want- we want the truth, and at this point, I don’t care how fucked up it is.”

“Devi, please.” Edgar chimed in for a moment. “This is really stressful, just let him-” Johnny held up a hand to silence him.

“He died. Edgar died. I did it. Jimmy died. I did that too. And THEN, something happened, and I got to try it again. Edgar lived. Jimmy still didn’t, and I still did it. There. Satisfied now?”

Devi started to say something, but cut herself off. She looked at Edgar, who hadn’t moved from being pinned to the boxes. Edgar thought he saw something of an apology in her expression, but he wasn’t sure. Just behind Devi, he saw Tenna move for the first time.

“Come on, Devi,” Tenna said, pulling on her friend’s arm, “you need to  _get out_ more.”

Still a bit stunned, Devi allowed herself to be dragged to the door. As soon as she was just beyond Edgar’s sight, he saw her hand claw at the side of the door, pulling her back in, much to Tenna’s protest. “Then-! Nny, then what about me?!”

“Devi stop! Let’s go! Let everything calm down.”

“What about ME?!”

“You’re starting to sound crazy!”

“What about-!”

“You got away.” Johnny seemed to stare through her.

Devi’s eyes widened and her grip loosened on the door frame. She flew backwards into Tenna, who hadn’t stopped trying to pull her away. Tenna nudged the door shut a few seconds later, presumably after she had Devi under some sort of control, and Edgar was left in the room with Johnny and Jimmy.

Johnny sighed, and walked by Jimmy, completely ignoring him, and into the back half of the office. His ‘room.’ Edgar heard him collapse onto the beanbag chair, and was unsure of whether he should follow or just sit and stare at Jimmy.  

“I apologize,” Edgar was saying words before he knew he wanted to say them. “You see how things are a little bit more than us being at my house on the weekends.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I’ll think about it.”  Jimmy turned and looked through the doorway at Johnny lying on the beanbag. He made a ‘hmph’ kind of noise then made his way to the door that led out to the main choir room. He went for the door knob, but paused before actually opening the door. “I’m not leaving you in here to fuck anything up, you’re coming too.”

Edgar took a look at Johnny, still lying on the beanbag, and bit his lip. He really didn’t want to just leave him there after all that, but knew that it was likely that Johnny would just continue to yell if anything was brought up for a while. He sighed, and walked towards Jimmy, who opened the door to allow Edgar to go first.

Jimmy shut the door behind them, and there was silence.

Devi and Tenna never came back, and Johnny never came out.  Edgar messed with the keyboard for a while, but didn’t really concentrate on it.

The next thing he remembered was waking up.

It had to be the middle of the night sometime. The door to the office was open, and there was no one in sight. Granted, there were no lights on, so there likely could have been a person three inches from Edgar’s face, but he was reasonably sure he was alone.

He stood up, adjusted his glasses, and stepped cautiously into the office, fumbling for the light. He always reached too low for it. When he found it and light filled the front room, he saw a trace of light graze the beanbag in the other room. Johnny, as far as Edgar could tell, was not in it. He crept into the back room to check for sure. Nothing. Just their usual stuff. Pictures, books, tapes, papers and general junk.

Edgar almost left through the side door, but then remembered the piles of stuff that had landed on him the last time he’d done that, and went the long way around instead. Go down the hall, make a right, pass glowing vending machines and the display case of the school mascot...

He pulled the doors a few times before they gave, and peered in. No, the gym wasn’t lit up the right way yet for Johnny to be here. No problem.

A little further down the hall, a left, and a tug on the door. They opened. Unlocked. He was up here.

Edgar climbed the stairs and felt a quick, cold rush of air. As he emerged onto the bridge, he saw the light from the rest of the town spilling in through the windows. Johnny wasn’t on the bridge, but then, Edgar didn’t expect him to be.

Squeezing between the broken door and the wall, Edgar made his way to the roof.

He would have liked to be able to walk up behind Johnny unnoticed, but with the roof covered in gravel, Johnny had chosen a place to be alerted to visitors very well.

“Hey.” The best he could think of.

“Hey.”

Edgar crossed the gravel, and sat down next to Johnny near the edge of the roof. Johnny was staring out at everything, looking quite vacant.

Edgar sighed, then took a readying breath.

“It’s okay.”

Edgar hadn’t expected Johnny to say anything. “What?”

“It’s okay. I’m fine. It wasn’t me.”

Edgar still thought that Johnny was taking it far too well.

“I don’t feel like anyone else,” Johnny continued. “I feel like I’ve got someone else’s cards stacked in my deck, but the deck is still mine in the end. For it to truly change, we’d need to replace everything. I’d have to be totally rewritten. You said that I didn’t want to remember ‘all the shit,’ right?”

Edgar nodded, then realized Johnny wasn’t looking at him. “Yeah...”

“Then I’m defining ‘all the shit’ right here. I’ve got pieces of the memories, and I’ll be happy if the rest of them don’t decide to show up. I know enough about where I came from, and what I might be doing here – I don’t want anymore. But. But even if I do remember everything that happened, there’s something I don’t have, even with the memories I have now.”

“Which is...?”

“The feeling. The intent. The emotion. The reasoning. The motivation.  As far as I can see, what would make me him is having all of that. All of  _his_  feeling.  If I feel just what he does, then I am him. I don’t feel the same way about it all. You’re more like the person I remember than I am like the person you remember, because my feelings are different.”

Edgar wasn’t sure how accurate this all was, after all, he’d been taking it all so literally all this time that what Johnny was saying sounded foolish, but still... If it would keep Johnny happy, or sane, or possibly both if the world was at all forgiving, then he’d go along with it.

“That doesn’t sound unreasonable at all.”

“You’re getting better,” Johnny said, seemingly out of nowhere.

“What?”

“At lying.” He smiled. “I can still tell, but you’re getting better.”

“Nny, I-“ Edgar tried to recover, but Johnny shook his head.

“It’s okay. I’ll prove it to you somehow, or I’ll just make you believe me. I guess it was nice of you to lie, though. Good intentions, right?”

“Sure.”

After a few moments of silence, Edgar kicked the gravel out of the way, and made a space to lie down.  He heard Johnny clear out a similar space, but did nothing with it.

“Ever sleep on a roof?” Johnny asked after several minutes.

“Can’t say that I have,” Edgar replied, looking up at what few stars where there to be seen.

“Good. It builds character.”

With that, Johnny stretched out into the space he’d cleared, and used Edgar’s stomach as a pillow.  He'd spent two years with him since the first time they'd set foot up here, and still gestures like this were random, unexpected and frightening. They made Edgar's skin burn, they made him tense up. He'd been so un-used to touch, to contact, that when someone as important as Johnny got that close, acted that familar, all of Edgar's senses reacted. When he finally had the words to ask what Johnny was doing, Johnny was already asleep, or faking it exceptionally well. Lying there like that, Edgar heard every noise at ten times volume, and imagined everything around him to have potential for waking Johnny up.

A faint sort of crackling noise was quite prevalent for some time before Edgar realized it was Johnny’s headphones. With much difficulty Edgar managed to take them off of Johnny without too much disturbance. He was about to turn them off, but then wondered what was playing, and put them to his ear.

It was something loud and growling, and Edgar was completely confused as to how anyone could fall asleep to that. He turned the player off, and set it somewhere in the gravel where he hoped it wouldn’t be kicked.

“Didn’t like the song, huh?” Johnny’s voice felt really strange on Edgar’s stomach.

“Not really.”

“Pity.”  With that, he shifted his weight a little, and went silent.

Edgar closed his eyes, trying to breathe normally, and tried to call up a song.

When he woke in the morning, he knew he had, but couldn’t remember the chorus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song is Augen Auf, by Oomph! Yeah, another German one.
> 
> The song is based on the German version of ‘hide and seek’, so the lyrics can be translated two ways – the literal German and the English equivalent. Granted, these lyrics aren’t my translation like the Nena songs from past SWAN adventures, but it’s a good one, with my little additions, so you should be good with it. I was actually very pleased at how much of the action fit the song. I totally recommend going back through and plugging the translations in now that you’ve read everything. My only regret is that it takes so much longer to describe/read certain actions than it does for them to happen, so if you listen to the song in conjunction to reading the story, the song seems to jump ahead a lot faster than the story, when real actions would have been fairly matched up. Alas.
> 
> Augen Auf itself means ‘Eyes Open.’ It’s sort of the ‘Ready or not’ part.
> 
> Cornerstone, cornerstone - Everything must be hidden 
> 
> I'm on the lookout again  
> Because we're playing our game  
> I'm waiting on the wall again  
> I'm standing close to the goal again 
> 
> And I hear your breath  
> And I smell your fear  
> I can't wait any longer ( here’s where we come in at the top of the chapter)  
> Because I know what you demand 
> 
> Cornerstone, cornerstone - Everything must be hidden 
> 
> 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10  
> Ready or not, here I come!/Eyes open, I’m coming!  
> Don't show yourself! 
> 
> I'm always calling your name  
> I'm always looking for your face  
> When I finally have you  
> We'll play truth or dare 
> 
> Cornerstone, cornerstone - Everything must be hidden 
> 
> 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10  
> Ready or not, here I come!/Eyes open, I’m coming!  
> Don't show yourself!  
> Hide yourself
> 
> 1,2,3,4, cornerstone  
> Everything must be hidden 
> 
> Cornerstone, cornerstone - Everything must be hidden 
> 
> Ready or not, here I come!


	13. Blue/Thunderstorm

_She’s been in there for days.  How much longer could she stand it? How much more food did she have? How much food could be jammed into a CD case?_

Tenna knew it wouldn’t be good. Johnny talking about killing everyone in the room was more than enough warning for her to try to get Devi out, but Devi had to hear it. Perhaps she thought she was just too special to Johnny to have been one of his statistics. 

 _True_ , Tenna thought,  _she hadn’t been, but instead Devi found out that he’d tried to make her one_.

There wasn’t anything Tenna could do, really. She slid things under the door, but short of camping in front of Devi’s door, or taking an ax to it, she simply had to wait until Devi recovered.

Devi once said it scared her how similarly she and Tenna thought. Tenna told her she needed to get out more. How could they even remotely be on the same wavelength?

*****

She’d been there for days. How much longer could she hold out? How much more was there to eat in the house? Would Tenna put bologna in a CD case again?

Devi really had thought that Johnny was hiding something when he wouldn’t talk about her after he woke up.  Somewhere inside, she thought for sure that she was spared Johnny’s memories of being crazy, but when she heard that he didn’t have quite the memory of her fate that he had of everyone else because she had escaped the one he meant to give her, something snapped inside. And maybe then, it stopped being his and Edgar’s little game, and more a surreal reality. 

 _Fuck,_ she thought,  _next I’ll be remembering my escape._

Tenna had been scuffling around outside the door for several days, but there really was nothing she could do.  She had been sliding things under the door, but other than setting up camp, or busting the door to pieces, she was just going to have to wait for Devi to feel better.

In the past, she felt that Tenna thought so much like her that it was frightening. Tenna’s response to that was the same as always. God, now that she looked at it again, how could she have thought that she and Tenna had any similar thoughts?

*****

Edgar felt some horrible tension in the air with all these new developments.  Not only was he unsure of how Devi was reacting to knowing she hadn’t been immune to her best friend’s madness, he was unsure of what kind of madness said best friend was now experiencing.  The sleeping on the roof had thrown Edgar off guard entirely, when he had really thought everything couldn’t get any stranger.

They hadn’t been to the choir room in a few days, heading into a week. (Or at least he and Johnny hadn’t – he could only assume the others weren’t spending any time there either.) The food appearing in Edgar’s kitchen came at an accelerated rate now that Johnny was there daily. Edgar was going about things on auto-pilot – making eggs and cherry Kool-Aid for most meals, with the occasional quick chicken thrown in for variety. He and Johnny didn’t discuss the sleeping on the roof, and Edgar wasn’t sure if they were both avoiding it, or if it was only the proverbial elephant on the couch to him and not affecting Johnny in the slightest.

When he finished throwing the eggs on plates, Edgar took them out to the living room, where Johnny was tightly curled up in the ugly pink chair, watching some infomercials.

Johnny looked up and accepted the eggs with a nod when Edgar presented them. There was no ‘thank you,’ but there had never been any real verbal gratitude in all the time they’d known each other. Edgar knew the nod was even out of Johnny’s usual brand of niceties and accepted it as Johnny’s highest expression of thanks.

Edgar let himself fall into the cushions of the couch, managing to keep eggs intact on the plate at the same time. He poked at the eggs a while, but was thinking too much to really feel hungry. Again, Johnny continued, unaffected by everything and anything.  Edgar stuffed some eggs in his mouth and attempted to eat, but he simply couldn’t.  While he was worried, the eggs tasted like rubber, and no amount of Diablo Sauce was changing it.

Edgar slammed his plate onto the coffee table. He had really intended to casually set it there, but the noise had already startled Johnny, and Edgar found himself on the receiving end of a stare.  He stared back.

“Nny, look, this-“

Johnny had said something too.

“What?” At the same time again.

“You first.” One more.

“Alright, that’s ridiculous. Seriously, you go.” Johnny was at least laughing. Good start.

“Okay, okay. Basically, I just... I want to know what’s happening,” Edgar started.  Johnny didn’t seem to know where that was going as evidenced by the raised eyebrow. “Well, okay, we’ve got you, and the keys, and the...,” Edgar made the ‘conjuring’ gesture with his hands, trying to find the best word, “ _stuff_  you’re remembering. We haven’t seen anyone in days, the most you’ve eaten is eggs, cherry Kool-Aid and lime Jell-O.”

“Green.”

“And, really, I- What?”

“Green. The proper name is ‘Green Jell-O.’ There is no lime here.”

If Johnny had been anyone else, Edgar would have accused him of not listening, of not focusing on what was most important, of something, but instead, he chuckled to himself, replied with an ‘Of course,’ and continued. “I’m just not sure what’s happening now. I mean, is this it? You remembered some scary shit and now we’re done messing around in this stuff, let’s go be domestic?” It felt nice to be the one accusing after all the freaking out Johnny had done recently.

Johnny looked focused on a knot in the wood on the coffee table, and his expression became harder to read with glazed over eyes. He sighed and put his head on the arm of the pink chair. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think it might be better just to pretend that book upstairs doesn’t know I’m here. Or that my keys aren’t going to try to tear their way out of my bag every time I talk to myself.” He was still staring at the table. “And sometimes, I wonder why I didn’t just listen to you, even though I know exactly why I didn’t.” There was a pause. “But I think what I should be thinking about most times,” he stood up, suddenly favoring Edgar to the coffee table, and Edgar felt something inside himself jump.

“...is Pepito,” Johnny finished.

And felt that same something die a little.

“Um,” Edgar swallowed once, “what?”

“Pepito,” Johnny began to pace around the room, as though reasoning a tactical invasion, “is the one who gave me the keys. Pepito is the one who owns the house the keys lead to. Pepito is the one who lives with Squee... who I think remembered me. And Pepito is the one who said he’d see me in a few years. He has to know everything. And I plan to go and get that everything.”

“And when were you planning on telling me that? After I made enough eggs for the four of us?”

“I wasn’t sure I was going to.”

“Then what were you going to say earlier, when we were talking over each other?”

“What time is it?”

“Six-thirty. Nny, what were you going to say?”

Johnny got up, slid into some old sneakers of Edgar’s, and grabbed his bag. “Coming?”

“Nny, come on!”

“A secret. Now come on, or I’m leaving you here.”

*****

It was chilly and grey outside, and the few blocks to Pepito’s house were even shorter than they should have been with Edgar processing ‘a secret’ in his head the entire way. He has just barely begun to grasp that Johnny was actually going to  _tell_  him said secret when they turned the corner onto Wolverine Way - Pepito’s street.  Apparently, Wolverine had been the school mascot of the old high school before some horrible fire that Edgar didn’t remember, and they never changed the name of the street the school had been on.

There were some strange mechanical devices in the grass near the sidewalk in front of Pepito’s house. Before Edgar had a chance to determine if they were satellites or GPS units, Johnny bent over and waved into one.

“How’s the research, Dib?”

The machines returned a static-ridden Trenchcoat’s voice.

“You’re in the way of the cameras, Johnny.”

“Good to hear. Carry on.” Johnny saluted the camera.

In all likelihood, Johnny hadn’t understood a word Trenchcoat had said.  He and Edgar approached the porch, and Johnny rang the doorbell while beating on the door and yelling for Pepito. Edgar cringed, but kept quiet. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to meet these people anyway.

About the time when Edgar thought Johnny would bash the door in with a crow bar, the knob turned, and a skinny guy with stringy black hair and a long t-shirt answered the door, at first looking ready to tell off whoever had been beating his door to death. One look at Johnny, and he attempted to slam it, but Johnny had already crammed his foot inside.

“Squee, you have to let me in!”

“I don’t have to let you do anything!”

A few minutes of struggling later, the door opened fully, and Johnny tumbled into the entry way. A sickly-colored man with even stringier black hair than the first guy was smiling in the doorway, holding the door open. He had keys locks and chains hanging from him, and Edgar noticed his eyes seemed to be a little off balance.

Pepito.

“It’s alright, Squee,” he was saying to his disturbed housemate. “I think we’ve been expecting him long enough.”

“Pepito,” Squee started, “I’ve already told you about this, you can’t possibly-“

“Shhh. Let’s talk to him.”

Johnny looked quite pleased with himself, and Edgar wasn’t sure how Johnny wasn’t hearing the ‘right where I want him’ tone in Pepito’s voice. Suddenly, Edgar was grateful that he had come along.

Squee vanished into the kitchen, mumbling something about cookies, and Pepito led Johnny and Edgar into the living room, where a video game was paused on the television. It looked like a first person shooter of some type.  One character was named ‘gOd_Of_HeLl’ and the other ‘dontshoot.’ The latter seemed to be winning.

The floor was warm. Not just ‘we have shaggy carpet’ warm, but ‘we have a hell of a heating system under our house’ warm. There was some loud music pounding away in the background, and Edgar thought he smelled something burning.

“Saved the cookies!” Squee exclaimed from the kitchen.

Something not cookies.

“So,” Pepito said, smiling that same smile from the moment he opened the door, “What brings you back, hmm? More cookies?”

“No. I don’t want your cookies. I want some answers.”

“And I believe we went through this a few years ago, yes?”

“Yes,” Johnny smiled, “but then, I didn’t remember.”

Pepito didn’t say anything, but the smile went away. Squee, who had just come in with cookies, looked like he may be sick. Johnny looked shocked that the information had had such an impact, before looking pleased with himself again.

Edgar finally spoke up. “Look, can someone just give us some information? We know something funny is going on, and that it has something to do with one or both of you.”

Pepito suddenly looked very worried, and nodded. “It’s alright. It’s looking like I have no choice now.” It was Edgar’s turn to be surprised that what he was saying was so effective. “But,” Pepito continued, “you,” he pointed to Edgar, “have to leave.”

“What?!” Edgar and Johnny again spoke at the same time.

“I will tell you what I can, but I can’t have him here. He is not involved.”

Edgar looked at Johnny, who stared at the paused video game for a moment, before looking at Edgar. He said nothing for a while. “I’ll meet you in the choir room,” he said finally . “It’s cold in there. If you want, there’s a trench coat in the band room.”

For a second, Edgar thought there had been something in the cookies, or in the music. But no, Johnny meant Dib. Dib set up his base of operations in the band room and Edgar could keep watch on the house from there.

“Okay. I’ll see you over there.”  Edgar stood up, and Squee showed him to the door and Edgar made his way down the stairs.

“Edgar, right?” Squee’s voice from behind him.

“Yes?”

“Um... I can’t quite explain this,” Squee said, closing the door behind him, “but, I’m really sorry.”

“It’s alright, it’s not like I’m not going to hear all about it anyway.” Edgar rubbed his arm, smiling weakly.

“No, not about this. About what’s going to happen to you.  I tried to tell Pepito a long time ago that this wasn’t a good idea. He’s gotten himself in too far, and I think you’re – no, you  _are_  going to suffer for it.” Edgar found himself struck dumb, and he stared silently at the nervous man in the doorway. “You’d better get going; it looks like it’s going to rain. You know what happens when it rains.”

He retreated into the house, and shut the door.

*****

Johnny felt a little strange that Edgar had been thrown out, but it wasn’t like he wasn’t going to share everything with him as soon as they got home anyway. He shifted his weight on the couch a few times before Pepito stopped pacing and started talking.

“First, ‘cuz I heard Squee do it, I’m saying sorry. This is not going to be without some pain. And I – fuck, no matter how I do this...”

“I remember things now,” Johnny offered, hoping that would make it easier for him to talk. “I know what Squee was so afraid of.  I’m not wild about it either.”

“Do you know what those are, Johnny?” Pepito motioned to Johnny’s bag, inside of which his keys could be seen and heard as they lunged towards Pepito’s kitchen.

“Keys.”

“Yes. Keys, but...” He held out his hand and Johnny tossed them to him. He began selecting a few at random, just barely holding them between long fingernails. “This,” he pulled a key out, “is the key to my old house. This is the key to the lock on a barn I once stayed in, this is the key to my old neighbor’s house, and-”

“Pepito, this is lovely, but I didn’t come here to listen to you reminisce.”

“And  _this_  is the most important key, and the reason I gave these to you.”  Pepito held a small skeleton key with a simple loop at the top, and the simplest of notches at its end.

“That? I’ve jammed that thing everywhere I can possibly think of, and it –“

“Doesn’t go anywhere,” Pepito finished. “This key was given to me a long time ago, by my father. He thought the safest place for it was with his son.” Pepito glared at the key for a moment, and then clenched it in a fist.  “He was wrong.”

Johnny wasn’t sure if this was a cue to ask some sort of question or not, but he felt like this was finally getting somewhere that was relevant to him, at the very least.

“The first time you lived," Pepito continued, "you died because of this key. Everyone did. Because of me and this key. At the time, I wore one lock on my necklace, and this key was its match. They weren’t supposed to have been opened at random, nor by someone with inexperience. I did it anyway. Squee was over one day, and we were tired of playing with the dog. I thought I’d find something he’d like.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Pepito snapped. “You know it’s not any different with you and mild-mannered-glasses-boy outside.”

Johnny felt a little disturbed, but decided again that it wasn’t time to say anything.

“Anyway... we weren’t the most well liked kids on the blacktop, so I thought Squee would be happy to see some of the others punished. He was nervous and upset about it, like he was everything else. The first time had been a little graphic for him apparently. And I told him, ‘Amigo, this will be great, don’t worry, I’ve got it.’ I told him I could keep everything under control. No, I couldn’t. Have you ever seen a cartoon on TV where someone spills an ink well, and it blots out everything? Everything but the whites of the main character’s eyes?”

Johnny was rather worried that he thought he knew where this was going. “Yeah... it wipes out everything, everything runs from it, and crams into one little corner before the episode ends or something...”

“There’s no episode end card when that happens in real life. When everything around you is swallowed up by black, there’s no giant hand to fix it. I ended up just resetting it all. Everything before me, everything before you, everything before ‘before.’ This key is the key to Hell.”

“Then... then it responds with my name to...”

“To Hell. It’s in my basement. The lock is somewhere in all this,” Pepito rattled the chains and keys strung around his neck and waist. “It makes the floor hot, and there are people screaming down there. We carpeted the place to have some excuse for the warmth and we play that music to drown out the noise. I gave you the keys to keep everything away.  If you had what got me into trouble the first time, and you went everywhere with it, there was no way it would be repeated. When you and that band of yours get noticed, and disappear somewhere, they’ll be nothing more to worry about.”

“Wait a minute,” Johnny held up his hands in a ‘hold it’ position. “You’re telling me that not only are you the son of SATAN, but you gave me a key to Hell, so  _you_  wouldn’t have to be responsible for it anymore?”

Pepito sighed.

Johnny felt himself shake with a rage that had been growing since sometime at the start of Pepito’s explanation. “You... you... filthy, conniving bastard, you disgusting, you... FUCK. You FUCKER. What’s wrong with you?!” Johnny’s rage really could have done much better, but he was still so full of questions that the rage wasn’t sure if it needed to be rage for too long.

Pepito looked blankly at him. “Right. All that. Son of Satan, yes? Are you really surprised?” Pepito rolled his eyes.  “Hell figured you were a good candidate to be our gate keeper, and our bid for control of Earth’s lock system. My father was never sure who ran the damn thing, and I'm not either, but the guys upstairs had a candiate, so we needed one, too. You were already an experienced part of the system, and had everything Hell was looking for. You were assigned to this for a long time. Originally, you were going to die, and be ours, and that was the end of it.”

“And then what? You thought it would be fun to fuck around with me?” Johnny grumbled.

“No, Heaven did. More specifically, their bid for control of the system did; their parallel to you - your Edgar. His wish to have you brought back messed with everything. Heaven thought it was a riot - they let it happen. I figured if I didn’t need to be bothered with anything Hell related ever again, I would be happy, so I sent you off with the key. It's sort of a loan situation, though I'm not sure who is loaning to who anymore. ”

Johnny’s head spun. Edgar was the reason he had to go through all of this? Well, yes, he knew that, really, but it had never quite been put to him that way. Before he could finish thinking, Pepito cut back in.

“Look," he said, gesturing with a half-eaten cookie, "this all comes down to this: You need to stay away from him.” Pepito seemed to finally be out of the department of back story, and back to something that Johnny could effect. However, it was not exactly favorable, and Johnny wasn’t planning on listening.

“Fuck you," Johnny spat. "Edgar’s about all that makes any sense in this shit you’ve conjured up for us, there’s no way I’m just going to waltz away because some loser who can’t take care of his own shit says so.”  He held out his hand, waiting for Pepito to return the keys.

“But you want them back now?”

“Damn right, I do.  My whole life’s on that key ring, I don’t care if yours is stuck in there, too. If all that’s going to happen because I have it is just that it doesn’t open Hell, then fine, let me go, and no one will say anything more about it.” Johnny was growing impatient with Pepito who still had a death grip on the keys.

“And that’s it, is it?” Pepito asked, “That’s all? No ‘who, what, where, when, why?’ No ‘Do you remember blank?’ Nothing? You’re quite a ways from the nosy kid who came in here a few years ago.”

Johnny sat back against the couch, and let out a sigh. All he really wanted was just to break out of here, take his keys, and never come back. He almost regretted coming, but now that he knew what his problems were, they didn’t seem like problems anymore.  What did he have to do now? He knew what the key wanted, he knew why the psycho had given him the keys, and as much as it pissed him off, what else was there to do?  Give it back and risk him losing it? Not happening. ‘Ink Well Syndrome’ wasn’t looking appealing – cartoon or not.

The heat from the floor was almost soothing now that it was getting to be later in the evening, and he almost found himself falling asleep reclined on Pepito’s couch. Squee was standing in the doorway to the living room, still looking pretty uneasy, but by now Johnny assumed that to be his default state.

 _“...Black tongues speak faster than the car can crash_  
You supply the rumors  
And I'll provide the wrath”

The music pounding in the background caught his attention for the first time. He actually had this song on his CD player, and had covertly played it for Edgar the night they slept on the roof. He wondered if the other song he had heard in this house years ago was one he could find. He didn’t really remember it, but he felt confident he could retrieve it.

Another sigh.

“Alright," Johnny said through yet another sigh, "there is something else I want to know. You said the first time I lived, that it was your fault I died. What happened that I’m here, and not in the second life? Did I fall off a bridge or something?”

Pepito dropped the keys into Johnny’s lap.

“We deleted you,” he said as the keys clinked against each other.

“Oh. So someone up there said, ‘Boy, Johnny,” the keys lurched at Pepito, “sure does suck at life, let’s just pretend that didn’t happen’?”

“Yes. You need to go now.”

 _“...Fate changes faster than the death of light_  
You supply the envy  
And I'll provide the spite”

And with that Pepito grabbed Johnny’s shoddily sewn sleeve and shoved him towards the door.  Johnny stumbled out on the porch, and Pepito thrust Johnny’s bag onto the porch with him.

“Stay away from him, I’m serious,” Pepito warned.

The door slammed before ‘Fuck you’ escaped Johnny’s lips, and he was left standing there, unsure of whether he wanted to break back in or break into a run in the other direction.  He turned and looked at the cameras in the grass. He smiled weakly at them, waving, and told them he’d be over shortly.

“I’m not watching  _you_ , Johnny,” the static Trenchcoat voice replied. Edgar's voice cracked through as well.

Johnny didn’t hear it.

*****

Edgar met Johnny outside as soon as he saw him leave the house through the cameras in the band room. Dib had been a little weird, but didn’t mind Edgar keeping surveillance as well. Johnny looked like he had been effected by the visit somehow, but Edgar really couldn’t tell how.

“Well?” Edgar asked, as soon as he was close enough.

“I don’t know.” Johnny was staring somewhere in the vicinity of Edgar’s wrist and sounded like he had been asleep for some time.

“What do you mean you don’t know? Didn’t he tell you anything? I heard you yelling at him, for God’s- for Pete’s sake, there had to be something!”

“I’ll tell you later, alright? For now I just want to go home.”

Edgar turned to the choir room, grabbing Johnny’s wrist to lead him back there. Johnny wasn’t moving. “Nny? Come on, I’ll help you unlock.”

“No. I want to go  _home_.”

“But thi- Oh.” Edgar smiled to himself, and felt as though he had accomplished something. “Okay.” A quiet laugh. “Let’s get going then. It’s getting dark and it smells like rain.”

They were silent for the trip back to the house, which felt so much longer than it should have. Not a word between them but the sound of Johnny’s headphones – always at max volume.

_“...here with me_  
 _To count the times_  
 _The days turned into years”_

 

 A few streets from the house, it started to rain. Edgar tried to speed up, but Johnny wasn’t altering his pace for anything in the world.  They continued slowly, and the rain picked up.

Soaked by the time he and Johnny made it to the porch, thunder threatening above them, Edgar was ready to tear the door down to get into some dry clothes, a blanket, and perhaps the pink chair. He turned to take out his key, but Johnny caught his hand.  Edgar looked up to find Johnny looking determined - finally a reaction beyond the glazed expression he had assumed for the prior part of the trip.

Johnny’s grip on Edgar’s hand tightened, and Edgar felt one of his fingers bend some way it really shouldn’t have. “Before we left,” Johnny said, “I was going to tell you something.”

The secret from before. Edgar had almost forgotten. “And...?”

“I’m not leaving.”

“What?”

“That’s it, that’s the secret. I’m not leaving.”

“I... Okay. Thanks, I... won’t leave either.”

With that, Johnny released his hand, and turned to go inside. He opened the door, and disappeared beyond the doorway, leaving Edgar baffled in the rain.

_“...next time the rain comes this way_  
 _And I find myself braving the storm_  
 _I will hear my heart beat...”_

And again, like the first time,

_“...over the thunder.”_

...his hand burned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pepito and Squee’s place – The Birthday Massacre’s “Blue”  
> Walking in the rain - Explode 16’s “Thunderstorm”


	14. Evil

They’d sat for some time. Some very long time.  Edgar still felt damp, no matter how many times he put his clothes through the dryer. He’d been busy trying to find some way of getting Johnny to talk that didn’t involve cooking more eggs and Kool-Aid.  He didn’t make eggs, but he also didn’t get much better than that.

“So, it’s been ‘later’,” Edgar said. “Can you tell me about what happened yet?”

Johnny looked up from his ramen, a few stray noodles sucked into his mouth as he made a questioning noise in Edgar’s general direction.

“About Pepito, Nny. What did he say?”

Johnny swallowed the noodles, and stared into the bowl for a bit. “Alright. Hang on,” he said, setting the bowl aside.

Johnny walked over to his bag, and pulled out his keys. He sat down on the couch beside Edgar, and dangled the ring in front of him, thin fingers pinching a single simple skeleton key. He shook it in Edgar’s face until Edgar took the key himself.

“That’s the one,” Johnny said as Edgar focused on the key, “The one that caused all this to happen. Guess what he told me about it?”

Edgar blinked. “Uh... what did he tell you about it?”

Johnny reclined against the back of the couch, and closed his eyes. He smiled. A smile that was more a ‘Wow, look at the shit I’m in, isn’t this hilarious’ smile than one of pleasure. “It’s the key to Hell.”

“It’s what?”

“The key to Hell. Pepito and company wanted to make me their new Cerberus. And you threw the wrench in it. You. By wishing me back here.”

“I... I’m sorry?” Edgar offered. His thoughts mutated into mindless babbling.

“I don’t blame you. You were doing something you thought would help.” Still eyes closed.

“Would you… rather I hadn’t done it?”

Johnny smiled at the ceiling. “I don’t think so. Some version of me agreed to it, didn’t he? I just… can’t believe how fucked up this is.” He sighed and sunk into the cushions.

Edgar stared, baffled, at the key in his hand. It was entirely unassuming – just an old skeleton key, with only a single tooth. It could easily open the simplest children’s toys, and maybe even some cheap journals from the dollar store. Grayish brown with rust and grime, this was the last thing Edgar would have pegged to be the root of all his and Johnny’s problems. 

“I can’t believe this,” Edgar mumbled, examining the key. “It just seems so common…”

Johnny laughed. “You’d think there’d be a few more sixes and pentagrams on there, right?” he joked.

“Or at least some flames and horns,” Edgar said, grinning.

Johnny snickered to himself.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Johnny said, waving his hand dismissively.

“Oh, come on, what?” Edgar prodded.

“No, seriously. It’s pretty bad, I’ll tell you later.”

Edgar shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Fine, have it your way,” he said, setting the keys aside.

“Thanks, I think I will,” Johnny grinned.

“So… was that it?” Edgar asked, “That couldn’t have been all he told you, I mean, you were pretty up-“

“No. Just no.”

“Nny, come on, you’ve been eating ramen for hours! Don’t you think-“

“No, no, fucking no. I’ll tell you fucking later.” Johnny was the only person Edgar knew who had such drastic mood swings. Edgar then tried to ignore the fact that he only actually knew four people.

“Alright, Nny. Look, I’m just going to go bed. Sleep on it or something.”

Johnny didn’t reply, and Edgar took to the staircase.

“And take your bowl back to the kitchen,” Edgar added from the top. He heard a clink of acknowledgement from the living room and, satisfied yet uncomfortable, he went to his room, shutting the door behind him.

He dreamed.

******

Edgar now in bed, and well into sleep, Johnny curled into his usual spot on the pink chair, late night infomercials in his very immediate future.

Late night, and the walls flickered a calming blue, no matter what was on screen. The voices were so excited and so fake, yet somehow they were almost calming.  It was about the time that late night television was going to work its sleep inducing magic when Pepito showed up.

Showed up. Not at the door, knocking, not called ahead to say he’d be bringing Squee’s cookies - just standing there, beside the couch, near where Edgar had been sitting earlier. 

“Don’t scream,” Pepito said as Johnny opened his mouth, “you don’t need to wake him, I’m not staying long.”

“What the fuck are you doing here? Aren’t you done bestowing little revelations on me yet?” Johnny snapped.

“I’m here to tell you to stay away from him. This is-“

“Shut up. I’m not listening to this shit again. You already did this once today, and I don’t know what you’re trying to get me to do, but it’s not going to work.” Johnny began to sit up, and fully intended to escort Pepito to the door, neglecting the fact that Pepito hadn’t needed a door to get  _in._

“I am trying,” Pepito said, annoyed, “to prevent him from getting hurt.”

Johnny stopped part way to the door, and looked back at Pepito, who was still firmly beside the couch. “What are you saying?” Not entirely convinced, but at least intrigued, Johnny tilted his head, listening.

“I am saying,” the chain-covered man continued, “that this is all going to hurt him.  That you would both do better to stop talking to each other. Just stay away.”

Johnny clenched a fist. “HOW? How am I am going to supposedly hurt, or be hurt? Why the fuck are you so vague?!”

“Because I have to be.  The conditions are not mine to rewrite, affect, or disclose. Your other half,” Pepito nodded towards the top of the stairs, “made the deal long ago, and affairs of his kind are not to concern me.  I shouldn’t even be here now - I won’t be able to stay under the radar for too long.”

“You think Edgar is watching you?”

“No, but his book is.”

There was a brief silence as Johnny and Pepito paused at the absurdity of the conversation that had just transpired, and the sadder truth that it was not even slightly absurd given their current circumstances.

“Listen,” Pepito spoke up, “if you stay here with him, if you keep associating with him, he will end up in more pain than he’s ever been in before, and-“

“I’ll kill him?”

“-and you won’t kill him, no. That will well be what he wishes for at the end, if things continue as they are.”

Johnny crossed his arms and leaned back against the recliner. “Why do you even care?” he asked. “Why does what happens to me, or to Edgar, matter at all to you? You are fucking  _Satan_.”

“My  _dad_  was Satan,” Pepito corrected.

“Then you’re Satan-In-Training, I don’t care. You’re supposed to be Hell’s big shot now, right? Then why aren’t you toasting some guy over a volcano, or beating old ladies with their own canes? What the shit are you doing in my living room warning me to stay away from Edgar?”

“Because I made a mistake. That is all. Think about it.  _Incredible pain, okay?_  I have to go -they’ll know I’m here if I stay any longer.”

And with that, Pepito faded, or vanished, or maybe just jumped out of the window. Johnny found he couldn’t process it as it happened, nor recall after it ended.

“F-fuck you,” Johnny choked to the air. He wasn’t sure if Pepito had heard him, but it felt good pretending.

Incredible pain. Edgar would be in pain if he stayed near Johnny. This certainly made forming a band difficult.

Debate raged in Johnny’s head for hours about whether to believe, and what to believe and what he should be doing depending on if he did or didn’t believe. He tried several times to simplify it – “Do you think this shit is true?” but he always got ahead of himself. He’d end up asking, “What does that mean for Edgar?” or “Then what happens?” before answering any of the first questions.

“How do I read the situation?” never got the attention it deserved when “Will Edgar die?” was still unanswered.

After some time, the best he could come up with was that someone who could materialize into your living room deserved to be given a little credibility when they start spouting life and death kind of shit.  Before he was completely able to determine whether sleeping in his house would cause Edgar the first waves of that ‘incredible pain,’ Johnny fell asleep sprawled over the pink recliner under the flash of infomercial blue, where Edgar found him the following morning.

****

“…n’t that hurt?”

Edgar was doing that talking thing again. He had done that more and more as the years had passed. He’d grown that little mini beard thing too. Johnny had thought it was funny at first that Edgar had done it just because Johnny had remembered it, but he then remembered his own blue hair dye and tried to think about something else.

“What?”

“Sleeping like that, doesn’t your back hurt?”

Johnny picked his head up from the arm of the chair, and looked around. Edgar wasn’t bleeding yet. Johnny was twisted into a pretzel shape that even he thought should be uncomfortable. He unfolded his legs and untwisted his spine, sitting up.  He tucked a piece of hair that had been getting too long lately behind his ear as he debated how much about Pepito’s visit Edgar should be aware of. It  _was_  Edgar’s living room after all.

“It feels fine,” Johnny said, answering Edgar’s question with his customary delay.

“If you say so.”

“So,” Johnny said to nothing.

Edgar raised an eyebrow. “So what?”

“So Pepito was here last night,” Johnny said casually.

“What?! Why didn’t you say something? I didn’t hear anything!”

“I can take care of myself, mother. Besides,” Johnny let out a breath, “he didn’t stay long, and he didn’t need to talk to you. It boils down to me leaving to make sure you don’t spontaneously combust.” Johnny stood up and headed toward the stairs.

“W-whoa,” Edgar stammered, “woah, woah, hold on.” He scrambled to his feet and grabbed Johnny’s arm as he hit the first step. “What are you talking about? What are you doing?”

“I’m getting my stuff, and getting the fuck away, so I don’t cause you to go nuclear or accidentally murder you. It’s not a hard concept to grasp.” Johnny attempted to pull Edgar’s hand away, but the grip was tight.

“Let go,” Johnny said.

“Nny, stop it! Tell me what’s going on. You can’t just walk off because of what  _he_ said, of all people.” 

Johnny backed off the step, and Edgar loosened his hold on Johnny’s arm. “He said if I stay near you, I’m going to cause you pain. I’m trying to do you a fucking favor here, now let go.” Johnny's voice was calm.

“And you’re just going to say, ‘Okay, sure Pepito!’ when he says shit like that?” Edgar released Johnny’s arm to wave his own around dramatically, “’Oh, Nny, please go jump off a cliff after you’re done smiting that fanboy!’ ‘Yes, Master! I don’t question you at all!’”

Johnny punched Edgar across the jaw.

“Oh FUCK YOU!” Johnny yelled, “I told you I’m trying to do you some good and you fucking  _mock_  me?! Well, GEE, look at me causing you pain already!”

Edgar stood up from his half-crouched position, and after rubbing his jaw, took his turn.

Johnny fell into against the stairs with the force of the blow, and after he regained the air in his lungs, cursed Edgar yet again. After a burst of “fuck you’s” from both sides, there was a silence - silence with the exception of some heavy breathing.

“You fucking bastard, I can’t believe you hit me,” Johnny growled.

“Fuck you, you hit me first.”

“You deserved it.”

“So did you.”

“Maybe I did,” Johnny said, sniffing what he hoped wasn’t blood back into his nose, “but you’re still a fucking bastard.”

“And you’re still my selfish best friend. Charming.” Edgar’s eye looked like it was already turning purple. Johnny felt a twinge of satisfaction looking at the mark and knowing it was his handiwork.

“I’m still leaving.”

“No you’re not.”

“Do I have to hit you again?”

“Do you have to be a complete dick?”

“Fuck you.”

Edgar stood up, and held out his hand. Johnny took it, and allowed Edgar to help him to his feet. “You need a better insult, Nny. ‘Fuck you’ is only effective every so often.” Edgar walked Johnny into the kitchen where he started running some water in the sink.

“You also just can’t leave,” Edgar said, wringing out a washcloth, “because you told me yesterday that you weren’t.”

“I have some more information today,” Johnny grumbled.

“What information? That you’d hurt me?” Edgar spoke as he handed the washcloth to Johnny. “Put it on your face, it’ll keep the swelling to a minimum.”

“I don’t need-“

“Don’t make me hit you again.”

“Fine,” Johnny said, grudgingly ramming the washcloth against his jaw. “And yes, the hurting you thing is sort of pivotal.”

“I’m not worried about it,” Edgar said rather cheerily.

“I am. I don’t wan-“

“Keep it on. And I don’t care. I imagine I’d be a lot more hurt if you were off avoiding me somewhere than if you stayed here with the possibility of hurting me.” He went on to busy himself with getting a washcloth for his own eye.

And they stood there for a few minutes, holding washcloths to their faces, blinking at each other.

*****

“What do you think they’re doing?”

“Oh, relax, that’s the last thing you need to be thinking about.”

“I can’t help it, I just-“

“BUTTSEX!”

“TENNA!”

*****

“So do you think you can tell me more about this now?” Edgar asked. He probably sounded far too cheery for someone holding ice to his bruising face, but he felt that it was getting him somewhere.

Johnny moved to a half-sitting position on the table in the corner, the washcloth still on his jaw, glaring at nothing – or maybe everything.

“Come on, Nny, this is ridiculous. Stop acting like a three-year old and just talk.”

“Fucking fine,” Johnny replied, picking his head up from the washcloth in his hand. “What do you want?”

“What do I want?”

“What do you fucking want?”

Edgar didn’t like how many answers to that he had. “…to know what he told you.”

“Well, lemme see here… I’m Hell’s favorite toy, you bringing me back is all a sick joke, and everyone up there thought I was such a riot, they just hauled off and DELETED me in my last life, that’s all.”

“Deleted you.”

“Yeah, and apparently, you’re Heaven’s special something or other and I should most definitely be leaving now.” Johnny started to stand.

“Sit,” Edgar interrupted. “We’ve gone through this already. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Fucking…fine,” Johnny muttered, “but if something starts going all… all…,” he waved his hand around in circles, “bad or fucked up or whatever, I’m leaving. You’re not going to become a casualty of Pepito’s complete failure at life too.”

“I like that ‘failing at life’ here refers to ‘failing at Satan.’”

Johnny smiled. “Wish we all had that problem,” he said.

“I think Jimmy would probably do pretty well,” Edgar said, watching the ceiling fan. Why was it even running?

“Nah, you’re thinking of Devi. Jimmy couldn’t Satan his way out of a wet paper bag.”

“You just made Satan a verb.”

“Fuck yeah, I did,” Johnny said proudly. “I’d like to see you beat that.”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

“Wimp.”

“Says the guy with the nosebleed,” Edgar smirked. “I just can’t take your extreme vocabulary skills.”

“Oh, fuck you. You think you’re so cool. I should call the battered spouse people on you.”

“Will you now? You know I only do it because I lo-“

“Oh, shut up!” Johnny threw the washcloth at him.

“You were asking for it,” Edgar said, quite satisfied with himself. Johnny clearly thought everything was hilarious, and no one was dead or bleed- well, okay, Johnny was bleeding, but not because of the battered spouse comment, so it was still a victory. He threw the washcloth back at Johnny who protested that he didn’t need it.

“It’ll be fine,” Johnny said, waving the cloth away, “besides, my face is seriously cold now.”

“I’m sure that it’s alright now, then.” Edgar tossed Johnny’s washcloth into the sink. He watched it slide down to the center of the sink, and fill the drain.

“So, did Pepito say how you would hurt me?” Edgar asked, glancing up from the sink.

“No. He just said ‘ _INCREDIBLE PAIN,’_ ” Johnny made some ridiculous face and twitched his fingers, “over and over.”

“Oh, just that? That’s not so bad. Here I thought you’d murder me with Kool-Aid or something.”

“He said I wouldn’t. Kill you, I mean. But that you would wish I could.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

Johnny fiddled with something on the table for a few moments, then looked up at Edgar.

“He’s the son of Satan,” Johnny said.

“He does sound like more and more of an evil fucker every time we talk to him, yeah.”

“No, Edgar, I mean  _really_.”

*****

Tenna dodged the last pillow and grinned at Devi.

“Jesus, Ten, what the fuck would make you say that?” Devi demanded, still armed with a cushion.

“Oh, come on, Devi, you can’t tell me you don’t think th-“

“I  _don’t_ think that!”

“Pfft, bullshit.”

“I’m fucking serious!” Devi hissed, launching the cushion.

“Nah, you’re not fucking anything, it’s those two who’re-“

“JESUS CHRIST, TENNA!”

“Alright, alright, alright,” Tenna said, hoping to avoid the pelting rain of more furniture. Devi had finally let her into the apartment after a bologna CD proved to have gone bad and stunk up the entire floor. Probably, Tenna thought, not the freshest “meat” to begin with.

“God…,” Devi breathed, running a hand over her head, and brushing a purple pony tail off of her shoulder. “Okay, Tenna, we’re going to try this again,” she said, repositioning herself on the couch. She straightened her spine, and faced Tenna, putting her hands out in front of her to ‘box’ things out.

“So,” she started, “I worry about Nny and the whole killing thing.” She mocked setting a box down over her left leg.

Tenna nodded.

“So you put rancid meat under my door.” Another box.

Another nod.

“And then I, against my better judgment, all common rationality, and everything that is holy, let you in.”

“Right.”

“I – and here’s the part where I get confused – worry again.”

“Yesss…”

“And you scream ‘buttsex’.”

“It wasn’t like that at all!”

“Then what  _was_  it like?”

“You were just so blah lookin’,” Tenna said. “Thought I’d give you a boost or something.”

Devi slouched into her remaining cushions. “You don’t really think so,” she said. Not a question.

“Eh, let’s say I might be a bit disturbed, but not surprised? Yeah, we’ll go with that. Do you want some Chinese? I know a great place where the delivery boy should get spooked enough to give us the stuff for free.”

“Don’t change the subject, Tenna. And no, I don’t want Chinese. It looks too much like your bologna.”

Tenna let out an exasperated breath. “Aren’t we done with the whole buttsex thing now?” she asked, standing up, “What more do you want? Chinese, Devi. Food. It’s good for you.”

“I don’t know, it’s just… I don’t know, I can’t decide if that’s fucking creepy or … just creepy, I guess.”

“Or maybe,” Tenna said, hands on her hips, “you’re just jealous?”

“I don’t want to screw either of them, Tenna.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Tenna said, resigning herself to the couch again. Devi clearly wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “I meant,” Tenna continued, “that you just feel replaced or something.”

“Maybe.”

“Can we get Chinese now?”

“Okay, Tenna, sure.”

*****

“And here I thought the horns were fake.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow. “You’re taking that awfully well.”

“Nny, there’s a book in my house that knows how many bananas I have, and when you come to visit – the fact that a scary looking man with horns who previously owned the key to Hell is Satan doesn’t really surprise me.”

“The son of Satan, actually,” Johnny corrected.

“In training then, still…”

Johnny smiled.

“What?” Edgar tilted his head.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

“Alright, sure. So… what now?”

“I don’t know,” Johnny sighed, “it’s just…so…like, do we go over there and kick his door in or burn his house and eat his children or something?”

“Shouldn’t he be doing that to us?”

“Point.  You see why I really just want to get up and go now?”

“Nny, seriously, let it go. I don’t want you to just disappear.”

“But-“

“No.”

“Just what exactly,” Johnny said slowly, “is the big deal?

“God, I don’t know,” Edgar said, frustrated, “the idea of my best friend wanting to avoid me for the rest of our lives is kind of a big deal to me. Maybe it’s that.”

“Get a new best friend.”

“I can’t.”

Johnny let out a puff of air. “Why the fuck not?” he asked. “I’m replaceable.”

If only being mocked, insulted and hurt could be solidified, then Edgar could justify feeling hit by a brick of them. ‘Replaceable’? Johnny actually thought he was replaceable?

“Holy…,” Edgar breathed, running fingers over his forehead. “You actually think that? That I can just conjure up a new one?”

Johnny evidently took this as a real cue to answer. “I do, I’m just-“

“Are you fucking  _KIDDING_  me?” Edgar snapped. “You really don’t get this, do you? You were dead, and I was there, saving you from Hell and you actually… You actually think I’ll do this for anyone. That it’s okay for me to have spent all that effort on someone who will just abandon me.”

“I di-“

“That the most important thing in the world to me is worthless.”

“I- I’m not… impo-“

“Don’t you even dare.”

“Edgar, what the fuck?! Are you out of your goddamned mind?!” Johnny gripped the collar of Edgar’s shirt. “I  _KILLED_ you once! Why doesn’t this register with you?”

“Because you won’t,” Edgar said.

“What?”

“Because even if it happened once before… it happened to different people,” Edgar said quietly. “The lines between you and the person I used to know are blurred. I’m not even the same. You might have killed me once, but  _you_  didn’t kill  _me_.”

Johnny’s eyes looked frantic as they seemed to search Edgar for something else to lash out at. It was almost a look of horror, but it was closer to “holy-fucking-fuck-Edgar-is-smoking-crack.” He took several short breaths, but didn’t say anything, though he clearly wanted to.

“Fucking…why would you…what the hell…why?” Johnny finally managed. “Why would you be so stubborn?”

“Why would  _you_?”

Johnny let go of Edgar’s shirt, and shoved him. “Because I give a damn about you, that’s why!”

“Me too,” Edgar said.

Edgar slightly disliked the way this was going. He’d spent so long being unable to let himself analyze anything about how he related to Johnny too deeply that this conversation was feeling a bit like going backwards. He really felt there was something fascinating about Johnny – something that he was drawn to since he’d agreed to come back to Earth, and life, to ensure Johnny’s happiness. He’d been thinking about the small group of friends he really had - if they were the only people who would notice him for the rest of his life, it didn’t seem so odd that Johnny would be the focus of his attention, past commitment or not.

So long ago, he’d had a hard time even thinking of Johnny as something more special than anyone else, though he still wasn’t sure what it really meant. He knew for certain that the person standing before him was important. He knew that he even admired Johnny to an extent.  Johnny was different; he’d been brilliant and talented before, and just happened to cross paths with incurably insane at some point along the way. Now he was still brilliant and talented, but the feeling was not the same.

Johnny was-

“Okay, Edgar. Okay. How do we avoid it then?”

Edgar shook his head, and snapped out of internal monologue mode. “Avoid what? ‘Incredible pain’?”

Johnny shrugged. “Yeah, that.”

“Keep giving a damn, I think.”

“‘Friendship saves the day?’” Johnny asked, rolling his eyes.

“We’ll figure something out,” Edgar said, tugging the collar of his shirt back into shape. “We shouldn’t focus every fiber of our being on it.”

“If you look for something, you’re likely to find it,” Johnny said, gazing blankly over Edgar’s shoulder.

“You also shouldn’t be unaware,” Edgar countered. “Don’t actively look for things that will get us both killed, but notice when they may show up. That kind of thing.”

“It’ll be alright,” Johnny said, grinning. “I’m quite skilled at vigilant, and I’m equally versed in baseball bat.”

“Oh thank god, we’re all saved now.”

“Go to Hell, Edgar.”

“I think that’s your job, actually,” Edgar replied, smiling.

“One day, that’s going to come back and kick you in the face, and if I am not dead, I will laugh at you. Loudly.”

Edgar’s smile disappeared. “You think you will be?” he asked quietly.

“Laughing? Fucking yes.”

“No, no,” Edgar said, shaking his head. “I mean, you think you’ll die?”

“I think we all might, Einstein.”

“No, I mean, during this? With Pepito and everything?”

Johnny sighed and rubbed his arm. “This is how I see it, Edgar,” he said, turning and walking out of the kitchen. “Either I stay and get you horribly mangled, or I disappear somehow. Pepito wanted me to do something. I was going to be useful to him before you brought me back. So…” He turned to face Edgar. “So there’s something hellish about me that I can use.”

“You’re not hellish, Nny.”

“Maybe not, but you’ve got to be marginally evil for Hell to want you this badly, don’t you?”

“But I came here to save you from all that!” Edgar protested. “I volunteered to live again so that you’d be happy!”

Johnny looked at the stereo. “Who said evil was the same as unhappy?”

*****

Pepito stood outside the house, staring into the windows, away from the detection of the book. He watched an entire day go by in silence for the two inside the house after the incident in the morning. He felt sure that he had seen something change, and he wasn’t sure if the change was in his favor.

When evening fell, the only sound the house had seen in hours leaked out of the stereo and into every room.

_“Taking photographs, speaking slowly through the permanent waves_  
 _the taste in her mouth that she read about earlier today_

_This is happening for your pleasure_  
 _At your leisure_  
 _Use your evil_  
 _When you want”_

Although he had been trying so hard to prevent any sort of agony on anyone’s part, Pepito admitted to himself that he enjoyed Edgar’s scream over the lyrics of the song.

 

_“When the night becomes automatic sequence joining the day_  
 _singing something new, someone else is sliding into your way…_

_when a menthol hit, hooks a spatial girl in her summer clothes_  
 _like a transmission on an empty channel – all lines are closed_

_this is happening for your pleasure_  
 _at your leisure…”_

For the first time, Pepito genuinely enjoyed the job he inherited from his father, and wondered if Johnny would enjoy inheriting it from him.

_“use your evil_  
 _when you want…”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Evil” – Ladytron


	15. Greatest Show Unearthed

“What are you doing here again?”

“Coming to see how your other half has taken my warnings.”

“You’re being awfully wimpy about it for being Satan.”

Johnny and Pepito stood in the middle of the street – away from the radar of Edgar’s book. Pepito seemed pretty cheerful. “Do we really have to go over that again? I’ve already told you I’m not Satan.”

“Look, I don’t give a fuck  _who_  you technically are.”

Pepito smiled. “You seemed to give enough of a fuck to try to get away from him. Is there some reason you didn’t follow through?”

“Because he convinced me otherwise, what’s it to you?”

“It’s my conscience to me, as far as I see it,” Pepito said, irritated, it seemed, at himself.

Johnny laughed. “Satan has a conscience now? You’re just pulling this stuff out of your ass now, aren’t you? Look, I’ve got your stupid key, you’ve failed at being Satan pretty intensely by now, just leave me the fuck alone. Edgar won’t be feeling any super pain over anything. I’m going to make sure of it. However,” Johnny paused to look at the sky, “I am interested in what you wanted from me. You needed me for something, what is it?”

“You don’t get it, do you? You were doomed from the start! What I need from you will only come at the end and there’s nothing to save him from it! It’s nothing but a waiting game for us now!”

“’Us’?” Johnny asked.

“Myself and Heaven. They’re interested in how this turns out too, you know.”

“The more you talk, the less I’m interested in how this shit ‘turns out.’ I don’t even know why I agreed to talk to you.”

“Because you’re curious. Because you really want to know. Because the fate of you y the ‘boyfriend’ in there really-“

“HE IS NOT.”

“Protest if you want, I’ve already told you I know that it’s no different, and you have to stop it. I’m not going to be able to help you for too much longer, I-“

“Whoa, time out.” Johnny crossed his hands in front of his face. “This is  _helping_? You want to run that by me again?”

“I’m here trying to stop him from being miserable, aren’t I?”

“And that’s ‘help’ I don’t want. Get the hell out of here. Go play your games and fuck with someone else’s existence – you’ve screwed up mine enough.”

Pepito let out some air. “It doesn’t make a difference,” he said. “In the end, it’s the same for us – you can only change how much he is hurt, nothing else.  We’ll see you at the end then.”  He vanished with a few clinks of a chain.

Johnny sighed, staring at the pavement where Pepito had been standing. He’d left a pothole. If Johnny had been the smoking type, this would have been where he’d have paused for a dramatic drag on a cigarette. Sadly, he didn’t smoke, so he sucked down the last of the cherry juice box that Pepito had interrupted, and went back inside.

*****

Edgar had recovered from his frustrated screaming from earlier in the evening, and was relatively calmly reading the inventory of his house while lounging on the couch. As he leafed through the pages, he watched Johnny’s name wiggle its way into the calligraphy of the latter pages. A few moments later, the door opened, and Johnny walked in, stubbornly sucking on the last drops of a juice box.

“You could just get a new one,” Edgar said. He really hated that juice box noise.

“Pepito was outside.”

“I’m starting to think he visits you at night and watches you sleep – would you mind letting me know about these things once and a while?”

“Yes.”

“What did he want this time, smart ass?”

“To tell me that the world is ending, that I’m taking you with me, and that everyone is gay,” Johnny said, flopping onto the couch. Edgar choked on his own spit and had to sit in a fit of coughs for a minute or two. Johnny did no more than raise an eyebrow.

“Better now?” Johnny asked after Edgar had gone a solid twenty seconds without hacking.

“I think I’m fine now, yes. Thanks for your concern.”

“How has Jimmy been doing with that guitar of his?” Johnny asked. Edgar was a bit startled at the abrupt topic change, but considering this was Johnny, it wasn’t really out of the ordinary.

“He’s… really getting better, I think,” Edgar answered after some thought. “Why do you ask?”

“I think it’s time,” Johnny said, looking into the fireplace. It wasn’t lit, and it wasn’t dirty. Edgar couldn’t even remember when they’d ever used it. More often than not they had things stacked in front of it.

“Time?” Edgar asked, trying to look at Johnny, but more interested in what Johnny was so fascinated with in the fireplace.

“Time to rock the fuck out. It’s about time we go for that happiness you keep telling me about.”

“And… your whole ‘evil’ thing?”

“I’ve already told you – happy and evil are not mutually exclusive.”

*****

It happened after the fourth try.

Edgar didn’t really realize it until after it happened. He’d been playing, as instructed, in the parking lot. He and the rest of the group had obediently followed Johnny’s every instruction and set up what dregs of equipment they had in a few parking places (using a fire hazard number of extension cords, surely) and played until they were exhausted. Tenna even played kazoo. Nothing had happened, and no one ever felt any different when it was over.

Then, a week and four concerts to no one later, there was eye contact. Edgar could not explain the feeling accurately. He had been letting his hands glide over the surface of every key, and for some reason, he felt he had to really pour himself into it. Everyone else seemed to feel the same thing and the music roared more intensely than he’d ever remembered. He’d projected himself off of the keys and felt truly that they were reaching beyond something that they’d never even touched before.

And then a student going to her car looked at them.  Not a passing glance, not a glimpse of something from the corner of her eye, but an honest look.  She stared at them, and when they finished a song, she walked toward them. Edgar was unsure of what to do – it had been so long since he’d had to worry about talking to new people.

“You… how did you do that?” the girl asked them. Edgar felt everyone change. A victory yell, a war cry, a scream, all silently contained with what little energy they had left.

“It’s what we do,” Johnny answered her. Edgar was fairly sure that Johnny didn’t know what she was asking about either, but he played it well.

“Could you,” she paused to look at everyone again, “do that again somewhere else?”

“Depends,” Johnny said. “What did you have in mind?”

“I think I know someone who could really use you.”

“Oh?”

“Come on, a band that just suddenly appears playing weird music like that? You guys would be great anywhere. Could you do what you did here in our cafeteria next Friday?”

“Maybe,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “Could you answer something for me though?”

“Um, sure.” The girl clutched her keys.

“Have you ever seen us before?”

“No, you just popped out of nowhere and suddenly there was a song and-“

“I mean at school.”

“You go to this school?”

Johnny smiled.

“We’ll be there.”

*****

No one watched them set up, and no one tried to not step on the cords. The students at whatever party Parking Lot Girl had been involved with gave Edgar and the rest of the group no indication that they even felt that it was odd that a place had been set aside for nothing. The party was themed apparently, and Tenna had decided that if they did become visible, the band would need to match the theme.  For this reason alone was Edgar in acid washed jeans. 

Eighties night.

No one knew what the eighties were originally, but the word evidently meant ‘outrageous’ nowadays. Devi was actually sporting some giant plastic earrings that Edgar found to be frightening, and Tenna had done some serious teasing to both their hair. For some reason, Johnny was not bothered by any of this mess, not even the makeup stars that Tenna had painted on all their faces. He stood silently in front of the rest of the band with energy moving through him already.

Edgar stopped himself from thinking too hard about two minutes before Johnny finally spoke.

“It’s Showtime.”

Johnny grabbed a microphone and swung it around to the speakers. The feedback earned him cursing and bitching from the band, but not even a murmur from the party. 

“I think we need to wake them up,” Johnny said.  He waved a hand and Tenna started their old tape deck. Hooked up to the biggest speakers they could find the sound was distorted and odd and a bit like a broken carnival.

Perfect.

Johnny started into an opening that he knew no one would hear.

 

_“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and ghouls_  
 _Step right up! Behind this curtain lies a ghastly concoction of delight horror fantasy and terror! Your every wish is our command - your every whimsical desire brought to life, but I’m warning you, there’s always a price._

_WELCOME TO THE GREATEST SHOW UNEARTHED!_

_The dark carnival is in town…”_

The opening bit of the song was Johnny and various accompaniments, but when the chorus hit, Edgar and the others got to join in with the vocals. It was in these moments that Edgar thought he felt more people watching.

 _“Welcome to the lower birth_  
The Greatest Show Unearthed  
We appear without a sound  
The darkest show around  
 __  
We will leave you in a daze  
Madness, Murder, Dismay  
We will disappear at night  
With blood on the concrete

_La,la la la, la …”_

 

During rehearsal, Edgar had felt stupid doing the ‘la la’ bit, but now, now he felt empowered by it, if only because someone in the audience that didn’t know they were an audience yet jumped and looked at the band when the la-ing began. She stared at Johnny while he finished a verse, and when the chorus kicked in again, even more people began to watch, hitting people beside them who didn’t see yet.  Edgar began hitting the keys harder, even if that didn’t make the sound louder, and with the last third of the song, the room was theirs.  


 __  
”Come inside, for the ride,  
 _Your deepest darkest fears_  
 _The best night of your life_  
 _You’re never leaving here_  
   
The Unknown, the Unseen  
 _is what you’re going to find_  
 _Witness this, witness that,_  
 _until you lose your mind!_  
   
Welcome to the lower birth  
The Greatest Show Unearthed  
We appear without a sound  
The darkest show around  
 __  
We will leave you in a daze  
Madness, Murder, Dismay  
We will disappear at night  
With blood on the concrete”

 

And people screamed. Most of them didn’t seem to know what was going on, but they wanted more of whatever magic made them suddenly see and hear a band where there had previously been nothing. They were applauding, they were cheering, and they were everywhere.

Johnny smiled at the mass and spoke into the microphone. “Hi. And how are you guys?”

The crowd cheered louder.

“That’s what I thought,” Johnny continued his very satisfied smile. “Congratulations, you’ve seen something that you can only see once – from now on, none of you will see us appear from nothing again. But if you bring a friend back here, say, on a Saturday, you can watch them realize that we exist.”

A roar erupted again. Edgar could only assume it was filled with cries of outrage or questions of why and how. Devi and Tenna started laughing behind him and Jimmy looked as though he’d finally gotten what he’d waited all his life for.

“That aside,” Johnny projected over the hollers, “would you teeming masses like a little more?”

Someone threw a canister of glitter out of the crowd.

“Alright then,” Johnny said, clearly pleased with himself. He motioned to Tenna to start the next strange backup track and from there, everything was a blur. Edgar remembered very little of what they played specifically, and who cheered when or why he only remembered the rush he felt when everything was over.

People would see him now.

He wasn’t sure if it terrified him or excited him for quite a while, before he finally determined that perhaps there is not as much of a difference between the two as people have previously thought.

*****

When the group realized that they were becoming popular, even on a small town scale, they began to demand things. Devi and Tenna had a song they wanted to do, but with ‘ _hello little boys, little_   _toys_ ’ as the opening line, those of the testosterone persuasion refused to play it.  Jimmy wanted to do everything in German ever since his brief stint with a song in the language. Edgar was actually surprised at his dedication to it – beside Jimmy’s guitar these days was nearly always a German Dictionary.

“Here’s one you’ll like, Nny, really,” Jimmy started one day. “It’s ‘massakrieren’. Awesome, right?”

“Jimmy, are there any German words that don’t sound like abused English ones?” Johnny was sitting surprisingly still while Tenna applied various layers of stuff to his face. When quizzed about it, she only called it ‘product’.

“Du hast mich nicht gehört!”

“Or like you’ve got a hairball?”

“You’re just not appreciating the awesome of this.”

“I’ll be sure to let you know when I do.”

“Oh, fuck you. This is fucking awesome and you’ll think so too, just wait.”

“You’ll have to run it by everyone else too, Jimmy, I don’t see why you’re bitching at just me.”

“Because everyone  _listens_  to you! Oder es ist immer der Edgar…”

“Because he’s special. Mann, wer hätte das gedacht, hmm?”

Johnny stood up and walked out of the room with Tenna and Jimmy gaping after him.

*****

“I look like I haven’t slept in weeks,” Johnny said, looking at his face in the cracked mirror that hung in the office. Tenna had applied some serious darks around his eyes and managed to make it look like his cheeks had become less than they already were.

“That was the idea, wasn’t it?” Edgar asked. Edgar stood behind Johnny, trying not to pick at a green star sticker Tenna had put on his face.

“Yeah. Does it look like me?”

“Yes, it looks like both of you. It’s a little disturbing.”

“Excellent.” Johnny turned to look at Edgar. “What should we do with you?”

“Well, you seem to be going for some kind of theme, though fuck if I can figure out what that theme is… I mean, stars, color coding and dead man make-up?”

“Yeah, that’s about it.”

“Does this have anything to do with…,” Edgar started nervously.

“It has everything to do with that.  ‘I’m not a homicidal maniac, but I play one on stage.’ ‘Dammit Jim, I’m a maniac, not a performer!’ Or maybe that would go the other way…”

Edgar had to laugh. “That’s how you’re going to deal with it then?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Johnny said, poking at the mirror with a gloved finger. “I’m going to perform the fuck out of it.”

“So, were you hoping the rest of us would do this too?”

“Well,” Johnny said, turning around to face Edgar, “if we put stitches across your neck…”  His finger brushed Edgar’s neck and Edgar felt his skin tingle.

“Stitches?” He asked, rubbing his neck.

“You can’t play as a living guy, and we can’t have you up there in pieces, so…”

“In pieces…”

“That was how I killed you, wasn’t it?”

Edgar swallowed. “Yes.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow. “Oh, come on!” he said, crossing his arms, “I’m not going to hurt you just because Tenna piled product on my face.”

“It’s not that, Nny, jeez! It’s just a little uncomfortable thinking about being in pieces.”

“So don’t think about it and just think about product. This is not hard.”

“And what do you plan to do to the others?”

“Jimmy needs stitches too - they just need to go the whole way up his torso. He’ll need to wear no shirts or just vests all the time. Dammit, I really don’t want to be the one telling him that. Maybe we can pretend it was Tenna’s idea.”

“And Devi?” Edgar asked. “You didn’t kill her.”

“I’m thinking we’ll just white her out. Get some flour or something.”

“This doesn’t bother you at all does it?”

“No,” Johnny answered. “Should it?”

“I feel like it should, somehow. Like, ‘Hey guys, pretend to be my previous victims, will you? Okay great!’ It just seems – Well, I guess it’s you, I shouldn’t be surprised.” Edgar smiled. “Is she going to draw them onto my skin, or sew some string into wax?”

Johnny grinned.

*****

“He said you need to look dead, but just dead,” Tenna explained, covering Devi’s face and neck in white powder.

“Why are you the make-up lady, anyway?” Devi asked between puffs.

“Because I wanted to be.”

Devi really couldn’t argue with that logic, and let it pass. “Did you say ‘just dead’?” she asked after a moment.

“Yeah,” Tenna nodded. “Why?”

“Not like, ‘special dead’?”

“Oh, well, Edgar and Jimmy both need stitches since they were apparently sliced to death back in the day.” Tenna spoke as through she were merely explaining a co-worker’s absence.  The car broke down, her kid has a dentist’s appointment, he was slashed to death.

“So I’m ‘just dead.’”

“Uh-huh.”

“God, Edgar gets to be special even when he’s dead.”

“Devi. The buttsex envy. It has to stop.”

“SWEET FUCK, Tenna, stop saying that!”

“Butt,” she poofed some powder on Devi’s nose, “sex.”

“Oh, hilarious. It doesn’t even bother you does it?”

“Buttsex? Not really.”

“Dammit, not that! I mean, preferential Edgar treatment.”

“I thought we got over this a while ago.”

“And maybe I still feel bitchy about it.”

“The way I see it,” Tenna said, smearing some ‘product’ under Devi’s eyes, “is that you, Edgar, and Jimmy all battle to the death for Johnny’s favor.  Maybe you can use the giant Q-tips.”

“Sometimes, I really hate you.”

“I love you, too, Devi. Close your eyes, or I’m going to blind you.”

*****

“So, I think I’ve narrowed it down to “Massakriert”, “Das Tod” and “Blutige…” something. What do you guys like? I think we can get someone to make a logo now that some people can see us.”

“Jimmy, had you taken into account that we neither speak nor sing in German?”

“Well, we  _could._ ”

Devi sighed, and Edgar tried not to follow suit.

The group had assembled in Edgar’s living room, since night visits to the choir room were one of a few sacrifices they’d made to be visible. He’d never had Jimmy in his house before, and he was sure that Jimmy was mentally cataloguing everything that he found unfit for Johnny. Edgar wished dearly that he hadn’t started becoming suspicious of Jimmy, because now they had even more in common, but, damn, Jimmy made it easy.

“Jimmy, I’m not naming the band “Bloody People” in German. We’re not even fucking bloody!” Devi said.

“But we  _can_  be!”

“But we’re not. Just drop it, jeez.”

Johnny had been sitting on the coffee table, trying to come up with some clever play on the stars they wore on their cheeks. They’d bothered to color code them, he’d said, so why not factor them in. No one else seemed keen on being called ‘The Stars’ or “Die Sterne” so they’d mostly been ignoring Johnny’s mutterings.

“We’re some dead people,” Edgar said. “We need something that plays on that more than anything else, I think.”

“Death Written in the Stars?” Tenna offered. “Sort of awkward, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, just a little.”

“Star-Crossed … something,” Johnny tried. “Damn. I’m sure there’s something.”

“Guys, forget the stars.  People are rarely known by their symbols, right? The convenience store isn’t ‘Happy Shopping Man’s Paradise’, it’s just Quik-Mart,” Edgar explained.

“Alright, alright,” Johnny said with a hint of a laugh. “I’ll let it go.”

“Well,” Jimmy said. “Nny is the guy in charge, and since he’s the only one not dead, maybe we should be ‘Nny and the Whatevers,’ you know?”

Edgar saw Johnny grin.

“I’m not opposed,” Edgar said. Devi shrugged and Tenna’s opinion, for the most part, didn’t count.

“So we’re ‘Nny and the Dead People’?” Devi asked. “ _Classy_.”

“No, no,” Johnny said. “It’s got to a little more elegant than that.”

“Elegant? Nny, I wore neon pink in front of other humans. There is no elegance here.”

“You loved it,” Johnny replied through a wide grin.

“Fuck you.”

“Nny and the Fuck You’s,” Tenna said, amused.

“It’s really sad how accurate that is,” Edgar said, shaking his head.

“Zombies,” Jimmy said.

“Living Dead,” Johnny countered.

“Walking Dead?” Tenna tried.

“Uh-uh,” Johnny shook his head, “ _Playing_  Dead. Oh, hey, that’d be a good one on its own.”

“When did you become so fond of puns?” Edgar asked.

“I didn’t," Johnny answered, shrugging. "They’re just easy for other people to remember.”

“Nny and the Roadkill,” Devi said, expressing how futile this method was.

“You know, I think I’ve got it,” Edgar said.

*****

“You keep coming back.”

“You made some pretty drastic changes since I last spoke to you.”

“Pepito, you’re going to start showing up every time I decide to shave my head.”

“And so are some other people. They can see you now, can’t they?”

 

_“Come inside, for the ride,_  
 _Your deepest darkest fears_  
 _The best night of your life_  
 _You’re never leaving here”_

 

“Yeah. They like it, and we like it.”

“You know what you can do like this.”

“Absolutely. It doesn’t even matter if we’re terrible, though I’m going to make sure that we’re not, they’ll keep coming to look at us, and to hear music that they can’t find in their heads. We were invisible, and unheard, and they can’t keep hold on us. The music everyone in the world has access to includes everything but us.”

“And you enjoy it?”

“It’s no different from you – the love of having control over a teeming mass of morons in a place far too hot for anyone’s good.  I just don’t keep my Hell in the basement, and my Hell loves me back.”

“What did you call it?”

“Oh, the band?” Johnny smiled and looked up from the pavement.

 

 _“Madness, Murder, Dismay_  
We will disappear at night  
With blood on the concrete…”

“We’re The Homicides.”

 _“The Greatest Show Unearthed…_ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Creature Feature – Greatest Show Unearthed  
> This song sounds the most like what I imagine the Homicides' music to sound like, minus the singer's voice, I guess, so it’s a perfect debut song for them. We’ve only been waiting two years for this, after all.
> 
> You can Babel Fish the German, if you’re so inclined. It won’t come out to perfect English, because they never do, and it's Jimmy, but you’ll get the drift. I’d never put anything that was dire and important in some language you guys don’t know, so worry not.


	16. discord in the garden

Edgar did not truly remember when he first heard the songs, but he was amazed when they appeared. Of course, at first, they were just in those few people he knew best, but it wasn’t long until he began hearing songs emanating from strangers. They weren’t strong, and they didn’t happen all the time and they often came in when he wasn’t meaning for them too, but they came.

In addition to music having drifted to people’s consciousness over time, songs also found new places to originate. Most of them were mediocre, nothing to burn to a mix tape or anything, but they didn’t have to be. Part of what attracted all people (not just him, he realized with some relief) to others was their inner song. Great personality and an upbeat song, let’s hook up.

Of course, when anything can be called mediocre, this means that something else has to be special. Something else has to set the standard. Edgar felt bad thinking about it that way, and he felt worse saying that he knew the people with the best songs. It was sort of like the kids in the neighboring elementary school arguing over whose dad would beat up whose – no one was going to say, “Oh, you know, you’re right; my dad would totally lose.” 

“Yeah, my friends  _do_  have shitty inner songs, you totally called that.”

But they didn’t. Edgar knew. He fancied himself as some kind of authority on the level of suck in a song now – he was in a band. ‘In a band’ meant ‘cannot be contradicted’ to the type of people who frequented the Homicides’ tiny shows.  Everyone thought the magical reveal was fun the first time, but after that, you had to like the twisted songs to continue enjoying it, and the people who loved them were not the picture of well adjusted.

Johnny never seemed to mind those people. Edgar didn’t know what it was, but something just drove Johnny to continue making these songs. He’d said that soon, when they were good enough, everyone would come just because they couldn’t get the songs in their heads.  He was right about that part. The songs were in Edgar’s mind as the notes he had to play, as the make-up he had to wear, but when he was trying to put himself to sleep at night, they didn’t play like the songs on Johnny’s old CDs. They didn’t appear there in his head, behind his eyes, and play like everything else, back up tracks and all, like even his friends’ personal songs.

He’d been outside, in the parking lot by the funeral home, when he first heard Jimmy’s song.

It was just after they started the Homicides. Jimmy’s trailer had sat there in that parking lot for many years. For some reason, the funeral directors had never had it removed, and the mourners over the years never thought much of it but occasionally wondering if the shack was somehow disrespectful to the dead. Jimmy had assured the group that his home was very disrespectful to the dead, thus assuring that Edgar wanted to enter it even less.

There had been an argument about whether or not someone’s cat had died under the trailer, and if it had, if it was Jimmy’s fault. Edgar had not been sure how Devi and the others figured Jimmy would have just killed a cat with his mere presence on the lot, but he’d kept quiet.

Something about his guitar came up, and Jimmy seemed to take great offence. Edgar wasn’t paying much attention, and later on, felt a little guilty about it, for whatever happened next sparked the song.

“…Edgar does it just fine!” Johnny had just finished saying. Edgar had opened his mouth to ask what it was he did, but Jimmy wanted to argue the point. “It’s all about him! You never just –  _never been hot enough but_ – me!”

Edgar had shaken his head and looked around at the others. No one looked confused, and the argument seemed to progress as though some of Jimmy’s essence didn’t just explode into song over his voice.

“Some day, you’ll see –  _I aim to start_ – than him!” Jimmy had kept yelling, and didn’t seem to notice the blips in his speech either. When Edgar listened closer, he could hear the song. It was just that, a song. A song that had originated in Jimmy, and somehow managed to reach Edgar when he felt enough rage. The oddest part was that Edgar could not understand how he hadn’t heard the song before – it seemed almost constant. Edgar had been able to hear Jimmy’s speech over it then, instead of the song breaking through his words.  While Jimmy argued about his ability to cope with demands made of him as well as Edgar could, part of him had sung loudly about where he was going and who he was.

_“When I was twelve_  
 _I sold my soul_  
 _to Lucifer_  
 _for a sack of coal”_

In one brief flash, Edgar had realized that everyone had to have these songs.

“ _cuz I never been hot enough_  
 _but I aim to start”_

Because if Jimmy was special enough for it, the rest of them surely were.  And then he felt horrible for thinking that way.

 

“So we got it,” Johnny’s voice interrupted Edgar’s thoughts.

“Huh?” Edgar looked up from the television, which had somehow started his thoughts on inner songs.

“The van,” Johnny said as though he’d repeated it several times already.

“Oh, oh, sorry. Yeah, how- how did that go?”

Johnny laughed and dropped into the ugly pink chair, legs dangling over the arm.  “Tenna,” he said, “apparently can drive.  And she and Devi saw that thing outside their apartment when that guy came to see if they could demolish the place, remember?”

“Sure, they brought it up back at the choir room, and you decided we had to have one for some reason.” Edgar rolled his eyes, but was smiling regardless.

“Right, well, the guy came back, and as he’s checking out the back of the house, Tenna sneaks out, and moves the guy’s van. He hears it, of course and goes running.  Course he can’t see Tenna - cause he hasn’t heard us play-,” he added, shaking his head as though the poor man with the possessed van was sorely lacking something, “and he’s chasing the damn thing around the parking lot.”

“Where was Devi in all this?” Edgar asked.

“Oh, upstairs, watching from the window. Same as always, you know? She makes a joke, and Tenna jumps on it literally.”

“Was she okay with this?”

“Seemed to think it was funny afterwards.”

“Alright, go on. So then what?”  Edgar took a drink of his lukewarm ramen broth.

“So he’s chasing this thing,” Johnny continued, “and Tenna turns it on him, and starts howling about the burial grounds of her ancestors.” Johnny had to stop and laugh for a moment before he could continue. “The guy – the guy just took off running.  He brought somebody back later, and Tenna’s in the yard doin’ donuts. There’s caution tape all around the house now.”

Edgar bit his lip.  “Don’t you think the news’ll be there soon? Or they’ll shoot out the tires or something?”

“Nah, it’ll be fine.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Johnny grinned and slid off the chair. He slinked over to the tray Edgar had set his bowl on, picked up the bowl, chugged down the remaining broth, slurped a single noodle, and in a dramatic motion that he’d likely practiced for the stage, set the bowl back on the table with a bow. “Because,” he said, inches from Edgar’s face, “it belongs to me.”

And for some reason, he was right. No one approached the van, no one approached the house. Even Pepito’s Trenchcoat stalker made no appearances. Jimmy watched his stolen internet all night for news about it, but there was nothing. Johnny and Edgar scoured the channels for it over a bowl of macaroni and cheese, but there was nothing on but another outrageous cleaning product and re-runs of detective shows.

“Fuck, that guy is never gonna make it out of there with that bag on his head,” Johnny had said when Edgar clicked through the crime channel for the third time.

“Would you have done otherwise?” Edgar asked, jokingly.

“Well, sure, stab the guys, knock out the cameras-,” he stopped abruptly when he looked from the television to Edgar. Edgar wasn’t aware of doing anything differently, but Johnny’s expression seemed to mean he had. Edgar glanced around nervously.

“What?” he asked.

Johnny didn’t say anything. For a moment, an expression of disgust crossed his face. Then he closed his eyes, stood up, and walked with his bowl to the kitchen. Edgar remained on the couch, confused.  A few minutes later, just before the sirens sounded from the television, Johnny’s voice came from the kitchen.

“Told you he wouldn’t make it.”

*****

“You did what to that van?”

“I made it ours,” Pepito said, scanning the channels.  He took bites out of some kind of sandwich.

“Oh.  What are you eating?”

Pepito looked as though he was surprised that he was eating something, and looked over at the thing in his hand. “Hmm. What indeed,” he said, regarding it as though he’d never seen it before. “Roadkill, perhaps.”

“It looks like it’s from D-“

“Shh! Don’t say that.”

“But that’s the place that gives me that horrible rash, and I’m itchy for days and-“

“Don’t talk about it.”

“Jeez, you act like the place is your dad or something.” 

*****

  
”Jimmy called - he’s been looking online and he hasn’t seen anything either.”

“How does Jimmy get a signal?”

“He says there’s a Pringles can on his roof that lets him steal from the neighbors.”

“The funeral home has internet?”

Edgar shrugged. Johnny looked half uncomfortable and half amused. “What would you need internet for at a funeral home?” he asked. “They bury guys by wireless now?”

Edgar shook his head. “I really have no idea,” he answered. “I’m just going by what Jimmy said.”

“‘Hang on, Grandma, I’ll pay my respects to Gramps in a minute –I just got mail,’”, Johnny chanted, making a face almost as soon as he said it. “Ugh,” he said seconds later. “When even  _I_  think it’s tasteless, there’s something wrong.”

Edgar thought he would say something about all the random high school girls that Jimmy had had in his trailer in the funeral home’s parking lot, but decided he didn’t really want to talk about what Jimmy did in his spare time.  Luckily, Johnny didn’t look inclined to continue the conversation at all and Edgar watched him drop into the pink recliner with a satisfied smile.

“It doesn’t matter anyhow,” Johnny said, waving his hand. “I knew no one would go after it. It’s my van.”

“You know, about that,” Edgar started. “How exactly did you decide that?”

Johnny held up his hands in a grand gesture, and Edgar flinched in the face of what he felt was going to be an epic story of only mildly comprehensible proportions.  Then Johnny’s hands fell down into his lap. “It just…,” Johnny frowned as he tried to find the right words, “…was. Is. It just is. I can’t really say why. I just know it’s mine. I thought, when I saw it there, even when I heard it was there, ‘That’s my van,’ and now it is.”

“People are supposed to sell their souls to Satan for bigger things,” Edgar said without thinking.

“I didn’t sell my soul,” Johnny snapped, glaring at Edgar. “It was sold  _for_  me. And if I get a van out of it, then that’s fucking fine.”

“I didn’t really mean it that way.”

“What would you sell out for?” Johnny asked quickly.

Edgar stared at the thin guy in his recliner for a moment. “I’ve done it already,” he answered.  Johnny opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t get to. “For you,” Edgar finished.

Johnny bit his lip and looked a little lost for the first time that Edgar could recall, but he pretended not to notice. Later on, Edgar would pat himself on the back for rendering Johnny argument-less, but at that moment it felt a bit – more than a bit ,who was he kidding – awkward.

Johnny regarded Edgar, who had caught himself staring. It looked as though Johnny would say something, but the moment never seemed to come. Just when Edgar wanted to dismiss everything, Johnny smiled crookedly. “At least I’m better than a van.”

Edgar laughed awkwardly. “Yeah. Considerably,” he managed. Something fuzzed in the back of his brain. He tried to focus on it, but as soon as he blinked, it was gone.

“Nny?” he asked when he couldn’t call the fuzz back for investigation.

“Mm?”

“Do you like Jimmy’s song?”

Johnny, King of NonSequitorpolis, tilted his head to one side and squinted at Edgar.  “Where did that come from?” he asked.

“No where, really,” Edgar said, rubbing his temple. “I just remembered it a minute ago, and wondered.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Like it.”

“I…think so?” Edgar sat on the arm of the couch. “It comes through so randomly for me, and it’s really hard to concentrate when it just…BAM, like that.”

Johnny looked surprised. “That’s what it’s like for you?”

“Um. Yes.”

“You get weirder and weirder every time we have these little bonding times, Edgar.”

“Well, what’s it like for you?”

“I hear them all,” Johnny answered.  “All the songs, I mean. Pretty much all the time. But they don’t cut over things like that. It’s like music that plays in a mall or something. It’s there, but you just tune it out like it isn’t. It gets louder sometimes when you get close to the speaker and if you like the song enough, you stand there under the speaker, looking at it, because that helps somehow.”

“I hear them like I’m tuning a radio,” Edgar said. “Sometimes there’s nothing, and it’s whatever songs I want to call up, or it’s half there, and other times… Other times it just overpowers everything.”

“Ever think you’re trying too hard?” Johnny asked, shifting position on the recliner.

“Trying too hard to hear voices in my head? Great.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Johnny said. “I mean, you remember, clearly, from what you’ve told me, what it’s like  _not_  to have the songs all there in your head.”  He tapped on the side of his head for emphasis.

“So what?”

“So,” Johnny continued, “Maybe you’re trying too hard to hear things because you don’t remember it being natural. Instead of getting used to it early and being able to functionally ignore it, you’re subconsciously trying really hard to hear it, and sorta… backwardsly fucking yourself over.  Mentally. Musically. Men-myuus-”

“I get it.”

“And?”

“I guess that’s possible,” Edgar answered. “I think I just… Maybe I’m not as mystical as you guys or something.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s nothing mystical about any of us, Edgar.”

“Says the guy with the key to Hell and a magical possessed van, who gets people to see him and his friends by singing at them.”

Johnny opened his mouth to form a counter argument, but came up empty. “I… damn,” he said. “Well, fine, I guess when you put it like that…”

“So, do you like his song?” Edgar asked again, steering the conversation away from dangerous Satan and specialness-related territory.

“Yeah, I do,” Johnny said, smiling.

“I think that surprises me,” Edgar said. He adjusted his balance on the arm of the couch.

“Why?”

“Well, you… don’t really seem to like Jimmy, so, it seems to sort of follow that-”

“I keep him around, don’t I?” Johnny shrugged. “Though I like him less and less lately, it started out being pretty neat having a personal fan club. It’s when the fan club wants to tie you up and drag you back to their evil lair and slather you with Cheez-Whiz that it starts getting out of hand.”

“Please tell me this didn’t happen.”

Johnny smirked. “Cheeeezzzzzzzzzz, Whizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz,” he buzzed, grinning wider with each second.

“Ugh, ugh, guch.” Edgar slid off the arm of the couch and half-buried himself in a cushion.  “God, that’s horrible,” he said to the upholstery.

“Heh,” Johnny smiled, satisfied and pulled the recliner lever. “So do  _you_  like it?” he asked.

“Do I…?” Edgar looked up from the cushion and blinked. “Oh, the song. I don’t know, I think so. I just said all this.  It’s really – well for me, it’s obtrusive, you know? But I haven’t heard too many other songs, so maybe they’re all like that.”

“You haven’t heard any others? You can’t tell me that Tenna’s song is obtrusive, seriously.”

“I don’t know if I’ve heard-”

Johnny started humming before Edgar could really finish.

*****

 _“She's got technicolor shoes_  
Untied, laces trailing  
But that's okay, I'm with the band, baby  
I'll follow you anyway.”

 

Devi had to admit that she felt better any time Tenna’s song got louder. Tenna’s song wasn’t completely Devi’s style, but it felt good. It was the kind of song people liked, even if it wasn’t usually their thing, even if they hated everything else the artist ever did, even if they publicly said the song was stupid and then listened to it on repeat with the doors closed and blinds down as soon as they got home.

 

 _“Excuse me_  
I don't believe we've met before  
But it doesn't matter  
Just let your belt buckle do the talking  
We'll be together in no time.”

 

Tenna seemed to know her song did this to people. Debates still raged in the scientific communities if a person’s song influenced their personality or if the personality shaped the song, but either way, Tenna milked it.  That song, or that personality, could get her anything she wanted. It was why she was the one they sent for the Chinese, it was how she was invisible and totally there at the same time.

 _“My finger's on her lips_  
We were laughing  
Slip off that pretty thing, sweetheart  
We can play dress-up later.  
  
What can I say?  
You and me both  
It's gonna be beautiful, isn't it?  
Leave your shoes on.”

“Devi, have you been outside today?”

Devi didn’t want to go. But she knew she’d end up out there anyway.

 

_“She’s got technicolor shoes.”_

*****

 

“It doesn’t  _sound_ like something intrusive…”

“You’ve never heard it?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Damn, Edgar, what the hell. Everybody’s got songs and everyone can hear them bu-”

Edgar looked up suddenly. “Nny, do I have a song?”

Johnny gave Edgar a look, but what that look was, Edgar wasn’t sure.  “You don’t know your own song?”

“No… should I?”

Johnny didn’t say anything immediately. He appeared to be thinking something over rapidly, but Edgar really couldn’t point out what, specifically. “It’s a good song,” Johnny finally said, “Don’t worry.”

“Does it have a name?”

“I’m pretty sure they all do, Edgar.”

*****

The group spent the next weekend cleaning out the van that Johnny and Tenna’s combined efforts had given them. The man who’d owned it before had been fond of candy and beer, if the tsunami of wrappers and cans that nearly killed Devi when she pried the door open was any indication. She regarded the whole operation as completely foul from that moment on.

Edgar had to admit to himself that he was not entirely there. He was focusing on  _not_  focusing on the songs around him. Jimmy’s kept jumping in at times and blocking out anything else, Tenna’s floated in the background rather nicely, and Devi’s occasionally made him grasp his head in pain.

_Never Been Hot Enough._

_She’s Got Technicolor Shoes._  
  
 _Work In Progress._

He could hear them all, and they meshed maybe not well or harmonically, but fit together in some way that he suspected he couldn’t hear. That didn’t occupy his thoughts for terribly long.

What bothered him was his own song. He could hear nothing from inside his own head except things he kept trying to force. Some songs he vainly hoped were really his and not just the stuff he had floating in his subconscious, and some he knew couldn’t be his, but were fun to pretend to own anyway.

Johnny had refused to tell Edgar the name of his song, or even hum a snatch of it for him as a hint.

“Some people say that you’re not fully a person until you’re familiar with your own song,” Johnny had told him. This was not exactly encouraging, but Johnny had refused to cooperate completely and had even stopped speaking to Edgar until he’d changed the subject. It made Edgar feel as though he was three years old, and that he’d just crossed an angry housewife at the same time.

And then he’d spent the whole night staring at his ceiling unable to think of anything but Johnny’s ‘Fuck You, I’m Not Telling’ expression.

“Hey, Edgar, you looking to get run over or what?”

Devi, leaning out of the driver’s side window of the van, stared at him, eyebrow raised.

“Sorry, sorry,” Edgar said, jumping out of the way.

“ _And she’s pretty sure it’s you_  
 _and you’re pretty sure it’s her_  
 _but no one will say a word_  
 _because it’s all a work in progress.”_

Devi’s song surged in Edgar’s head as she pulled the van over the spot where he’d just been standing. There was a lot of yelling, but it still had a melody he could appreciate. He had been worried that his feelings about everyone’s songs would reveal some sort of deep seated issue with their friendship, but he found he liked all the songs to a degree, even Jimmy’s.

“ _There was that time at the King Buffet_  
 _And the other in the drive thru,_  
 _When she said, ‘I can take him’_  
 _And you were pretty sure it wasn’t you._

_And the idiots surround her_  
 _And she tells them all to go to hell_  
 _Because they’re in her space now_  
 _And they can’t even fucking know._

_Cry ‘blasphemy’, cry ‘fuck you’_  
 _But don’t bother to change_  
 _Because it’s all a work in progress, dear_  
 _And we’re all bound to be a little strange.”_

When he stopped listening, Edgar realized the others had moved, and went to join them while conjuring some excuse as to why he’d spaced out. He didn’t want to risk being seen as ‘not complete’ to anyone, so no one but Johnny was going to hear about his inability to process his own song.

He didn’t need his well rehearsed story of seeing Pepito’s face in the concrete and then seeing Trenchcoat Kid in the bushes – no one even noticed when Edgar approached.

“The door’s shot,” Tenna said.

“I’m telling you, if you’d just let me in there, I could-”

“Tenna, let Jimmy try the door,” Devi said when she saw Tenna prepare to argue.  Jimmy gave Tenna a toothy grin and went about trying to get the door to lock in place when it was shut.

Edgar watched as Jimmy slammed the door repeatedly, and his triumphant pose when it finally stayed.

“That’s great, MacGyver, but now I can’t get it open,” Johnny said from inside the van.

Devi sighed and thumped her forehead on the steering wheel. Edgar stood near her window, poking at the side view mirror. “Call me when it’s time to paint it,” Devi said into the wheel.

“Devi?” Edgar ventured.

“Are we painting it now?”

“Um, no?”

“Then we’re not talking now.”

At that second the whole van rocked back and forth, there was a giant clang, and Johnny made a noise from inside. The door was open now, and Johnny was lying on the floor of the van sounding dazed.  Jimmy practically pounced on him.

“What happened, what happened? Are you okay? Do we need to call someone?” He asked as he scrambled into the van.

“Not unless you wanna sing for them first,” Tenna pointed out.

Johnny sat up, and shook his head. “Whew,” he managed. “No, I’m good. Just hit my head on that, that, thing. Guess there should have been a chair there once or something.”

“Shit, Nny, you’re bleeding,” Devi said, looking through her pockets for something to give him. Edgar was pretty sure she’d made the same conclusion he had – the van was far too filthy to trust anything in it as a bandage.

“I’ve got it,” Jimmy said, with a hint of mockery. He pulled a small rag out of a pocket and handed it to Johnny, who eyed it warily, despite persistent bleeding from the cut above his eye.

“Thanks,” Johnny said when he determined the cloth not to be covered in questionable substances.

Edgar felt bad about it, initially, but afterwards, it was all he could think of. In his struggle to find his own song, he’d neglected something equally important, if not more so.  And he strained to find it while all this happened - it was the perfect opportunity, after all. But there was nothing.

He listened desperately for Johnny’s song, but could hear absolutely nothing.

*****

It didn’t make sense, Edgar thought as he walked through the door and into the living room that evening. It just didn’t add up. Nny. The most musically obsessed person he knew, the person he’d  _found_  because something had been so strong in him music-wise, had no song that Edgar could hear.

That of course was a limiting factor – Edgar couldn’t hear a lot of songs in other people. According to Johnny, everyone else could hear the songs of total strangers, and it was only Edgar who had trouble with even his own.  Sure, Edgar could hear some strangers, and some friends, but still.

But still.

Still.

Johnny had to have one that out volumed Devi’s and Jimmy’s. He had to have the strongest song of anyone in town, at the very least. Edgar really didn’t want to admit that he was sure that Johnny’s would be the strongest on Earth – there were certain fanboy things he desperately wanted to remain in Jimmy’s court.  If anyone had a song that Edgar would be able to hear, it really should have been Johnny.

Johnny himself strolled by with some sort of cherry fruit snack package just as Edgar was going to call for him.

“Nny!” Edgar said, a little too enthusiastically.

“Gah-ah! What?”

“I-sorry, sorry. Um, I wanted to ask about your song.”

Johnny turned on the television. “What about it?” he asked, sounding bored.

“I can’t hear it.”

“And?”

“I just wondered what I was missing, I guess.”

“I think it’d be cheating if I told you,” Johnny answered with his mouth full of fruit snack.

“Nny, why is this such a big secretive deal to you?”

“It just is.”  Still staring at the television.

“Nny, come  _on_. I feel like some kinda freak or something. Of all people, I can’t hear yours? Or even my own?”

“‘ _Of all people?_ ’”Johnny echoed, turning his head slowly to look at Edgar.

“Well- Well, yeah. You’re my best friend. I guess I want to see if I like yours better than everyone else’s or…” Edgar realized he was sounding dumber by the syllable, so he just let it trail off. There was an awkward silence for several seconds.

“I like yours best,” Johnny said, with his standard lack of eye contact. “You should work on not trying to hear it so hard. If it’s so important to you that I value my own existence this time around, I’d appreciate it if you valued that song.”

“Oh.” 

Edgar the Lame-Ass.

“I’m gonna make some fishsticks,” Johnny said, and he walked out of the room.

And that was that.

*****

He’d been spending considerable time with Devi lately. Devi was Edgar’s little island of sanity, his insider’s look into the stuff Johnny did when Edgar wasn’t watching.  They were in the choir room together after a chain of shows over the course of the week. Weekends made it safe to use as a base of operation while not teeming with highschoolers.

The longer they remained a band, the more complicated the show or the costumes or the something else got. Tenna had Johnny and Jimmy off in one of the bathrooms to study where slash marks on Jimmy would go if Johnny had made them, so Devi and Edgar stood by in the choir room waiting their turns. Edgar wasted no time.

“He was so strange about his song when I asked about it.”

“Asked what about it?” Devi asked.

“Oh, just… you know, something. I don’t really remember,” Edgar lied. Devi clearly didn’t believe him, but let him continue.

“Alright, so what about that has got you all…” she waved her hand to indicate the general vicinity of Edgar. “…weird?”

“Well, he said he liked mine best. My song, I mean. I don’t know, it was just so nice feeling. I kinda got all warm and gooey inside, I jus-“

“Ugh, Edgar, too much information, thanks.”  
  
“Wha- No! No, God, I didn’t mean it that way. Jeez.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“So what would you say if I told you yours was my favorite too, hmm?” She asked, sliding down in her seat.

“I’d be flattered, I guess.”

“But not ‘gooey’?”

“Eww. Dammit, Devi, it just sounds horrible when you say it now.”

Devi grinned at him, and he found that after he got over the initial horrible, he could grin back.

“No,” Edgar replied, finally. “Not gooey.”

“I figured as much. How long?”

“How long what?”

Devi gave him a look. “How long have you been seeing him differently than ‘best friend’?”

Edgar figured he’d always been seeing Johnny as ‘differently than best friend’, but only because the circumstances were so bizarre. Johnny was someone he owed, someone he was brought here to be useful to, to make happy. He was a little more than a best friend, really. Edgar had always thought that, hadn’t he? He was fairly sure.

“For… ever, I guess,” Edgar answered. Devi looked skeptical.

“I’ll leave you to figure that out then,” she said, and disappeared into the ‘office.’

“Bu- what?” Edgar was honestly sure he had no idea what that had been about.  The more he sat there in the old chair, the more he was confused. She’d probably meant to tease him, or mock him or do some kind of twisted match making, but Edgar wasn’t Jimmy – he never felt the need to drag Johnny off into a trailer and do horrible Cheez-Whiz things to him. Edgar was just a bit more devoted than most.

Considering that Satan’s son was readily involved in the whole thing, Edgar didn’t understand why his own assessments of his relationship with Johnny were anything to get all cryptic over.

“Devi suspects, Edgar. Kiss me, before it’s too late!”

Tenna dropped herself into Edgar’s lap, sending both of them, plus the chair, to the floor.

“What the hell was that about?!” Edgar yelled, pulling his legs out from under Tenna after a shocked moment on the floor. Tenna gave him a look she probably learned from Devi.

“She thinks you’re after Johnny – we need to throw her off the trail,” Tenna said when Devi-Face vanished.

“Because kissing you and having her want to skin me alive as a result is definitely an improvement over cryptic conversations.”

“Hmm, you have a point,” Tenna replied, tapping her chin.

“Do I look like I’m after him?”

“You look like you already  _got_  him to me, but I don’t know anything,” she answered, rolling her eyes.

“Is this some sort of really big deal all of a sudden? Do I have some kind of ‘fucks his best friend’ pheromone that no one is telling me about?”

Tenna snorted. “Maybe,” she said, trying to hide giggles.

“What?”

“Are you?”

“Wha- NO! There’s nothing going on! What is wrong with you guys, lately?”

“You know, Edgar, I don’t think we’re close enough friends for me to be the person who makes you contemplate your feelings – it’s the law of teenage after school specials. I could say so much here, but I’m just gonna let it go. Do you want to come do the make-up test with me and the offending best friend?”

“Sure. Sure, that’s fine.”

 

It was not fine. It was not fine at all. Johnny had rigged up a collection of knives from the cafeteria, some broken trays and scary pieces of glass and metal he picked up from various playgrounds and parking lots to resemble something Edgar would rather not have recalled.

“Did it look like this? I mean, if you sorta squint?” Johnny asked, contemplating the mess.

Edgar felt sick.

“What? This is it, right? I killed you in some kinda machine, yeah?”

Edgar felt his brain liquefy and he wanted desperately to fall on the floor. Then he felt hands on his shoulder, and was led to the center of the gruesome display.

“There, does it look better from there?”

“Nny, he looks like he might blow some chunks…” Tenna said warily.

“Edgar?” Johnny asked.

“It’s fine,” Edgar managed, holding his stomach. He wasn’t sure what to be more sickened by – the machine thing, or that Johnny was making so light of it.  It was about the moment that Tenna traced the path of a single broken tray onto Edgar’s torso that he vomited, and sank to his knees.

_“She's got technicolor shoes  
Untied, laces trailing-”_

Tenna’s song flared up as Edgar fell, but calmed down after only a few lines. He heard something foreign for just a moment, and cursed that he was finally hearing Johnny’s song when he couldn’t attempt to memorize it. Then he felt that it wasn’t Johnny’s at all.

“ _They once said I glittered_  
 _they once said I shone_  
 _but nothin’ ever happens here_  
 _as I’m sure you already know.”_

 

On the bathroom floor, partially covered in vomit, Edgar heard the first strains of his own song.

“ _If happiness is all we have_  
 _then how am I here today?_  
 _Say ‘hush’ and take a picture_  
 _But you can’t see me anyway.”_

Edgar looked up to see that Tenna had gone, presumably for help, and that Johnny was kneeling on the floor beside him, mouthing the words to Edgar’s song.

“Sorry,” Johnny said in the middle of a verse about broken bones. “I think sometimes he gets a little too excited about the Homicides.”

Edgar was afraid to open his mouth, but tried to give Johnny as questioning a look as he could.

“The other me,” Johnny said. “Don’t worry, though. He likes your song, too.”

Tenna shuffled in with the janitor’s giant rolling bucket just then and got to cleaning. Edgar was given a new shirt and several drinks of water and was generally shuffled around and fussed over as much as his companions could be expected to. In his daze, though, he could still hear (and still see Johnny mouthing the words of) the tune in his head.

“ _Sticks and stones could break my bones_  
 _if they were really there_  
 _as it is now, I’m immortal_  
 _cuz until I find happy_

_I have nothing to fear._

_If happiness if all we have_  
 _Then how I am here today?_  
 _I exist without a world_  
 _Track all my time without a day._

_If happiness is all we have…”_

Edgar realized several things in that last strain of lyric, least important of all, but most pressing in his mind, was that he really liked his song.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The songs featured in this chapter don’t really exist. I mean, I can’t share them with you as an Mp3.
> 
> Jimmy’s Song, Never Been Hot Enough (http://crow-sensei.deviantart.com/art/Never-Been-Hot-Enough-18968847), was written by Crow.  
> Tenna’s Song, She’s Got Technicolor Shoes, (http://sibilantesses.deviantart.com/art/She-s-Got-Technicolor-Shoes-86091990) was written by Lana.  
> Devi’s Song, Work In Progress, and Edgar’s Song, If Happiness, were written by me.
> 
> The song quoted at the top, though, which is close to how I imagine the meshing of all these songs will FEEL, is ‘Wine Red(Tommie Sunshine’s Brooklyn Fire Retouch)’ by The Hush Sound. The remix part is important, because otherwise, you'll think I'm on crack.


	17. Confrontation/If I Had a Million Dollars

Some things changed for Edgar rapidly since the day of puking out his own song. Something had clicked in him that day, hearing Johnny hum at him, and he’d gone home afterwards and done some serious evaluating.

And in the years since that day, things began to move. The Homicides traveled to neighboring towns and surprised people in parking lots with their van and their music. The van was a little lacking in anything fancy, really. The Homicides spent most of their time driving around in the van that now had the Arial Font equivalent of a spray painted logo on it – it was generic and didn’t really look special, but it was also a little bit bigger than the alternative so maybe no one would notice that what was written contained less content. Edgar thought he’d once turned in an essay like the van.

In other towns, people started to talk. The more the van traveled, the more people talked about the band in it. Local news people, thinking they’d captured a riot, accidentally captured part of a Homicides show on tape. What the news crew saw was a bunch of insane looking college age kids pop out of nowhere. The camera saw it too, but only for a given value of ‘saw.’ When the footage aired, no one watching the news saw anything at all happen when the audience exploded and the news crew started swearing and pointing. Johnny had been happy that some people probably lost their jobs over it.

After that, people remembered ‘Homicides’ as ‘that thar hoax video thing,’ and they’d come to a show when they saw a flyer. Soon, the fast food place parking lots and pool halls were too small, and they moved to auditoriums and department store parking lots. Managers who would otherwise kick them out were so thrown by the spectacle and the music they couldn’t get into their heads that they let the band stay. Devi had said she imagined that they were good for business anyway.

And it got bigger. And bigger. Soon, Edgar and the others found themselves performing elaborate shows, most with totally different costumes than the last. One week, they’d look like they did back at their debut in the cafeteria, and the next, they were pirates, or characters from novels, or even in holiday costumes fucked up enough to represent them well. The Homicides started to become just as much a visual thing as an audio thing, and Johnny and Tenna got together to decide that the band would play nothing out doors any longer. All Homicides shows started in the dark, and they ended in dark.

The most successful show, and the one that ended up being the signature act, was the one that gave Edgar the most chills. No matter how long he had spent with Johnny, the fear of things coming back unsettled him. From Devi’s reaction, he’d guessed it made her a little ill, too, but if she could do it, then so could Edgar. They filed the audience into a room, mostly pitch black, waited until they were certain there would be a riot, and then had Jimmy slam something on the guitar, or even Tenna blow a kazoo into a microphone backstage. After that, lights, and effects and whatever was needed came on. The show established some kind of mythos that the band was really a collection of dead people, with close ups on the make up that Tenna had become so amazing at.

It wasn’t until the end of the show that it really drove the point. Somewhere like halfway through the final song in a concert, Johnny began ritually ‘killing’ his band mates. With a gesture in the direction of who was to be offed, the lights shut off on the victim, their mic was silenced, and they were to stop playing. By the end of the song, it’d be just Johnny left, and he’d hum the last few bars of whatever song they’d begun before snapping his fingers just short of the end and ‘killing’ himself as well.

And people ate it up. The band really was ‘Nny and the people he’d killed.’ Nny and the Homicides. It made Edgar a bit ill, but even he felt a bit of a rush when Johnny disappeared at the very end. This was a significantly smaller rush than the one he got when Johnny walked by Edgar’s keyboard when a performance was over, grinning wildly, and saying, nearly every time, “I think they noticed, Edgar.” This more often than not produced a high Edgar was sure he could coast on for at least a week.

By spending all his time in the van zipping around the country, Edgar started to realize how many of the weekends, then weeks, then months with just Johnny that he’d wasted. Now Jimmy and Devi were around all the time, and Edgar never got to so much as look at Johnny before feeling like he was on surveillance from several angles. He was pretty sure he’d been distracted by looking out for Jimmy and thus his brain snuck away on him, but it was in this environment that Edgar finally let himself come to a realization he’d been trying to avoid.

That he’d somehow fallen for his best friend.

This was definitely not what Heaven had had in mind when they sent him back, he was pretty sure. There was that split definition between ‘happy’ and ‘gay’ that he was sure had kicked in by this time in however far in the future he was from when he last remembered. Even without all of that, his mission to make Johnny happy and all, he was pretty sure that he, Edgar, was not the thing that would make Johnny happy directly.

“I’m here to make you happy. Yes, just me. Aren’t you thrilled?”

No.

It found ways to weave its way into everything Edgar did. Johnny singing even sort of in his direction was enough to either make him play the worst or best notes of his life, often at the same time. If Johnny was even marginally witty, Edgar was charmed by the joke for hours. A tap on the shoulder or shaking hands or a post concert hug made all of Edgar’s skin burn. He desired nothing but to see Johnny smile, or hear him laugh.

The worst part was that this was no different than how he’d felt since the first time Johnny had introduced himself in the choir room. It took him several hours in the back of the van, staring at the highway and watching it unwind itself behind him, to really let that sink in. After it did, he started to wonder if he wasn’t alone. Maybe, in all that time, in all Johnny’s joking and the sleeping at Edgar’s house and the blatant favoritism that Devi and Jimmy had bitched about for years were similar feelings for Edgar.

And when that came to him, so did his ridiculous idea to just ask.

 

*****

Everything was perfect. There was nothing on Earth now that did not make Johnny smile. Jimmy made him smile, Devi made him smile, Tenna and her make-up made him smile. Assassinations and earthquakes and wars and baby corpses in peoples' closets and alien abductions and car accidents and people jumping from buildings all made Johnny feel just fine.

Because people could see him.

It wasn’t an ego thing. It wasn’t attention or popularity. There was nothing in him so shallow, he was positive. This was justice, this was fucking with people’s heads, this was making something that reeled people in and never let them go.

This was also probably pretty fucked up, but that didn’t bother him as much as he suspected Edgar would think it should. 

He was sitting on the new seat in the van. They still called it the ‘new seat’ even though it was several years old by now. They’d put it in the spot where Johnny had cut his head while they were first assessing the van’s usefulness. It was a different color than the rest of the upholstery, and probably didn’t match the original outside color either, though so much of the paint had been gone by the time the Homicides got a hold of it that it was rather impossible to tell. Still, the seat was nicer than the other ones, so Johnny claimed it – he’d spilled some blood for it, after all.

The van was empty, save for him, at the moment. Everyone else had piled into a shabby-looking roadside convenience store to get some snacks. Johnny had been feeling too inspired lately to bother with food, so he’d stayed behind. He was folded up in the chair just smiling into space. Soon, they’d be popular enough to not have to use the van, but they’d do it anyway. 

“we wouldn’t have to eat Kraft dinner…”

He hummed to himself, amused at nothing in particular. Just when he was close to some kind of elaborate fantasy of ruling the world, he heard a thump on the window. He looked up, and Tenna loomed over him, forehead and nose against the window, bag of corn chips gripped in her teeth, and piles of other stuff in bags in her arms.

Johnny rolled over, since he’d ended up on his back in the midst of ruling Venezuela in his head, and popped the door open. Tenna and snacks collapsed into the van and onto Johnny’s knees.

“What’dja get?” Johnny asked, ankle-deep in snacks.

Tenna shook some little packs of cheese filled pretzel things out of her hair, and stood up, careful not to crunch anything.

“Nny, we got everything. If the store had it, we bought it. I’m pretty sure Jimmy’s even allergic to some of the stuff he bought.”

Johnny smiled, yet again. “You bought it?”

“Yes.” Tenna smiled back.

Devi and Jimmy filed out of the store, bags in arms, and Edgar soon followed. Johnny sat back in his chair and pulled his legs up while the rest of the crew loaded bags in around him. They really had only the slightest idea of where they were, and weren’t sure of how many stores they would pass on the way. Stocking up on food high in partially hydrogenated cardboard bits was essential to life on the road.

“I can’t believe they could see us,” Edgar said from the seat behind Johnny. The click of his seatbelt punctuated his sentence.

“I still can’t believe you guys were happy about that,” Jimmy said, “Just meant we actually had to pay them.”

“The possessed tortilla chips game gets old, Jimmy, really,” Devi said, stashing sauce packets in the glove compartment.

Johnny grabbed a popcorn ball from a nearby bag and started tossing it into the air, occasionally hitting it against the ceiling. “It’s alright,” he said. “It just means that those people we’ve never met have seen us somewhere. This is more important than some bags of chips, don’t you think?”

Jimmy shifted around in his seat, and tore open a box of crackers. He made some noise that Johnny took to mean he had hit the ego button, but didn’t say anything else.

“You have to wonder where, though,” Tenna said, as she pulled the van into reverse. “I don’t think we’ve been out here before.”

“We were sort of on the news once, weren’t we?” Edgar asked.

“Yes,” Johnny answered, “but unless there’s something special going on here, they still would have to have been in the audience to see us now.”

“But the audio was there, wasn’t it?” Devi asked.

“That’s the problem,” Johnny said, smacking the popcorn ball again. “Shit, I think this is going to be pretty unpleasant to open now,” he said, looking at the loose bits through the plastic bag. He tucked it in a cup holder beside him and continued. “We don’t know if anyone else heard the audio. We could hear it on the news for sure, because we knew what was being played. We could hear it because we count as people who have seen us.”

“They could have just been in the audience once,” Jimmy said, rolling his eyes.

“Then it’s a wonder they didn’t try to maul us or something when we went in,” Devi said.

“Maybe they didn’t recognize us alive and without Nny,” Edgar offered from the back.

“Oh, fuck you, Edgar!” Jimmy yelled, throwing a handful of crackers over the seat.

“HEY!” Tenna yelled to the windshield. “Don’t you make me turn this van around, or so help me you’ll all go to bed alive!”

Johnny snickered. More and more, he appreciated Devi’s choice in best friend. He hadn’t felt particularly excited about Tenna when Devi first brought her to the choir room, but she grew on him. Maybe just because she proved useful eventually? Could be.

“Speaking of alive,” Edgar said, shaking some crackers from his shirt, “are we doing the ‘standard dead’ when we get there?”

“I don’t even know what we’re doing when we get there,” Johnny said, staring up at the ceiling. He felt the whole van get quiet, and then saw some fascinating patterns in the fuzz on the ceiling. He heard everyone around him erupt in chatter, but he didn’t really listen. Instead, he twisted onto his back again, and watched the way the wires on the poles by the side of the road seemed to jump as the van drove down the highway. Every so often, he twitched his foot to the beat of a song no one else could hear.

*****

“Nny, get up, come on!” Jimmy’s voice, accompanied by the new seat shaking violently, woke Johnny up several hours later.

“Alright, alright,” he said, rubbing his shoulder. Had slept on that funny. Would probably feel fucked up for the rest of the night. “Is it dead people time?”

“Yeah, let’s move,” Devi said, popping in from the other door. “Careful, you’ve got that bag stuck to your foot.”

*****

Johnny was pretty sure he was God when he watched hundreds of people suddenly see him. Then he remembered that Edgar told him God sort of sucked, and Johnny settled for ‘messenger of mind blowing shit,’ or whatever else sounded cool to him at the time. Whenever Johnny said hello to a crowd of people who’d just seen him materialize out of nothing, he felt higher than anything else. Higher than he’d ever been before.

He liked just as much to look at the rest of the band, really. Jimmy always gave him some wolfish grin, and tried to look even the slightest bit more bad ass. Devi usually wasn’t able to make eye contact, but when she did, it was a sly half smile, like she was getting away with something. And Edgar.

Edgar always looked like he looked right through Johnny for a moment, and once, he’d faltered on the notes when Johnny looked at him. Devi had compensated by beating the hell out of her drums, so no one noticed, but after that, Johnny saved glancing at Edgar for when he sounded like he was solidly on task. The missed notes never happened again.

Johnny liked to find people in the audience that looked too into it or not into it enough. He reached out and grabbed people he saw who seemed like they thought he was a reflection, a smoke and mirror trick, and just vaguely pointed at all the kids in black makeup. Both frequently had hard times breathing after that.

And he relished it. And those people would be back.

Soon, they were big enough to be important. Big enough to be televised as more than a novelty video. Most people had seen them, and they’d bused themselves around the country in the tiny van. Johnny turned on televisions in dingy hotel rooms and saw his own face on the news. Edgar opened doors to tiny stores and had excited people speaking a language he didn’t understand screaming at him and flailing wildly. Jimmy had fangirls. Devi had fanboys and fangirls. Tenna had little recognition and she liked it that way. She appreciated when some strung-out art students told her she was visionary, but she shrugged it off. She wasn’t doing anything terribly new and exciting in her mind, so it was no big deal. She recommended Devi’s paintings to them instead.

Johnny had fan people. He thought they were okay, but liked messing with them more. They approached him in the streets and asked about him and Devi. He’d had a hard time with how these people could see something sexual in something that was never made to be taken that way, but then he remembered that this was the world he was dealing with. He told everyone that they’d all know soon, and when they were photographed for something for the first time, he made sure everyone was holding hands with everyone else.

The Homicides were on posters in the big stores, and every one of them depicted everyone with everyone else. Johnny liked it that way. People kept asking, and he kept promising that the next photo shoot would reveal whether it was Jimmy or Devi. He kept trying to figure out if it was Jimmy’s vibe of ‘take me now’ that made people even ask about him, as he was fairly sure he hadn’t been seen in public hugging Jimmy like he had Devi, but he didn’t let it bother him.

Not much at all bothered him.

*****

They had to lie on the floor, in formal suits, save for Devi, who had some kind of small dress thing, surrounded by some black ribbon or video tape innards or something.

“I can’t lie on the floor with a hat on,” Edgar said, trying to demonstrate that he, in fact, could not. The hat covered his eyes, and rested on his nose. Johnny tilted his head, then knelt to the floor, taking the hat.

“What if,” he said, “you just lay like this?” And he held the hat on his stomach as he rolled into his back.

“Seems sort of dumb to have gotten the hat when I wasn’t going to be able to wear it.”

“Oh, get over it,” Johnny said. “We’ll take one you can wear it in.”

He stretched out on the floor and decided to just stay there for a while.

“Does the hat look stupid like that?” Edgar asked.

“Edgar, please, would I suggest something stupid?”

“‘Edgar, let’s go see Pepito!’”

“Hey, that was important! Seriously though, it looks fine.”

Jimmy stood over him, and Johnny squinted up into the lighting to see his face.

“Nny, we need to figure something out with this, they’re not going to be patient while you roll around on the floor with Edgar.”

“I’m not rolling,” Johnny said, sitting up, “I’m just-” Then he thought of something.

“Come here,” he said to Jimmy, who seemed to forget about being the voice of reason instantly, and dropped to the floor as quickly as he could.

“You too,” he said to Edgar, motioning him to come closer, “And the hat, come on.”

He took Jimmy’s hand and directed him onto the floor, and then dropped flat onto the floor himself. He motioned to Edgar.

“Alright, here,” he said, arm out. With both Jimmy and Edgar attached directly to him, he’d mess with every perception of his relationship with the band ever. No one ever suspected Edgar.

Edgar also, apparently, didn’t suspect Edgar.

“Just… on your stomach or something?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Johnny said, “this’ll be great.”

Devi walked over, arms crossed, “Nny, does this have anything to do with-”

“Shh,” Johnny interrupted. “Can you and Tenna find a spot around here?” He gestured with his head to indicate the areas around him and the two attached to him.

Within a few minutes they’d wrapped up the shot with little mess. Johnny was already looking forward to the tabloids.

On their way out, Jimmy wondered aloud why had posed for ‘some kin’na formal homicidal orgy’ instead of the straight line they’d planned on.

*****

Several weeks later, the group managed to return home for a small break before setting out again. Edgar had his first time completely alone with Johnny in weeks. He thought it would be a good time to just miraculously ask the crucial questions, but it was turning out to be harder in real life than it was in his head. They ended up doing lots of little cleaning jobs, and Johnny wasn’t ever receptive to ‘serious voice.’

“’Yeah,’ I said, ‘Devi’s beautiful, but it’s not like-‘“

Edgar didn’t hear the rest of Johnny’s story. Nor had he really heard anything else he’d said before hand.

“Oh, you think so?”

“Think what?” Johnny said, moving a box. They had come down here to the basement to clear out some of the random stuff that Heaven had been sending for years and have Tenna take it to the New To You place to make up for the stuff that Johnny had taken from there over the years.

“That’s she’s beautiful.”

“Yeah,” Johnny shrugged. “She could be pretty damn exotic if she cared about that kinda shit.”

“What’s…attractive about her?”

Johnny paused to give Edgar ‘what the fuck’ face, but shook his head and went back to moving boxes. “She’s got a really severe kind of face,” Johnny said, “and she’s a little strange looking. Suppose that’s why people don’t talk to her much or something. I mean, aside from the whole almost invisible thing.”

“Severe, huh?” Edgar said. “Severe how?”

Johnny screwed up his face. “Edgar, seriously, what the hell?”

“I’m just curious!”

“Severe like she’s going to eat your face in your sleep and she knows where you live, I don’t know!”

“Huh,” Edgar said, trying not to sound dumb. “You know, your face is kinda ‘severe’ too.”

“Great, I guess.”

“I think it’s the nose, or the eyes or something.”

“You spend a long time studying my face, there?”

“No, I don’t think so. I just wonder if maybe people are attracted to people with similar features or something.”

Johnny stopped for a moment, closed his eyes, and shook his head. “You think I look like Devi?”

“Sort of. Do you find Jimmy attractive or anything?” He had to check.

“I have no idea, I can’t see beyond the acne.”

Edgar moved a box to the bottom of the stairs. “How about if you squint?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Johnny said, “but he looks like he’s on crack all the time. Or he’s inbred or something.”

Edgar snorted.

“So, Devi yes, Jimmy maybe, Tenna…?”

“Nah. I don’t care how neat she turned out to be, or how nice looking I’m sure she is to other people – I just look at her and hear the squeak of that thing she made a couple years ago, back when we first assimilated you.” Johnny said. “I think sleeping with her would be like listening to a dog with a chew toy.”

Edgar laughed, and his side hurt a little, before something struck him. “Wait, sleeping with? When did this become the ‘sleeping with’ list?”

Johnny shrugged. “Figured that’s what you meant.”

“Oh. So you’d sleep with Devi?”

“Before Jimmy.”

That was about as far as Edgar got. A few days later, he and Johnny were going over some of his music, and Edgar thought he’d get another chance.

“Shit, have you listened to this song?”

“Hmm? Which one now?” Edgar wandered over to where Johnny was sitting on the floor with all of his old scratched CDs.

“It’s these two guys screaming at each other.”

“Screaming,” Edgar said, raising an eyebrow.

“Lyrically.” Johnny stood up and went to slip the disc into the stereo. The song started playing as he walked back in the room.

“Is this…Nny, are these show tunes? Did Pepito give you this?”

“What? What the fuck makes you associate Satan with show tunes already?”

“Well, there’s that stereot- wait, already?”

Johnny grinned. He made a shushing motion with his hand. “Jus’ wait, it’s coming.”

The song started with some man who, in Edgar’s opinion, really just needed some happy pills. It wasn’t until the other voice chimed in that he realized something was up.

“Do you really think  
that I would ever let you go?  
Do you think I'd ever set you free?  
If you do, I'm sad to say,  
It simply isn't so.  
You will never get away from me!”

The first voice came back.

“All that you are  
is a face in the mirror!  
I close my eyes and you disappear!”

The men, who Edgar realized were one and the same, sang in and out of each other’s arguments until the song reached a climax.

“Soon you will die,  
And my mem’ry will hide you!  
You cannot choose but to lose control.

 

You can't control me!  
I live deep inside you!  
Each day you'll feel me devour your soul!

 

I don't need you to survive  
like you need me!  
I'll become whole  
as you dance with death!  
And I'll rejoice  
as you breathe your final breath!

 

I'll live inside you forever!

 

No!

 

With Satan himself by my side!

 

No!

 

And I know that, now and forever,  
They'll never be able to separate  
Jekyll from Hyde!”

“Is that great or what?” Johnny asked, part way through. “It’s like ‘not only am I going to fuck your shit up, I’m gonna do it with SATAN.’ That’d be like having the greatest army ever. Well, no, maybe not army,” he paused for a moment, “but like a sidekick. A really bad ass sidekick.”

“You’d want Satan as your sidekick?” Edgar asked.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say he’d be more fun than ‘Sidekick Jesus.’”

“I think I recall something about Jesus wanting to live inside people forever, too,” Edgar said, smiling.

“They could do battle,” Johnny said, motioning as though he had action figures, “‘I have Jesus in me!’ ‘Yeah? I’ve got Satan!’ And then Jesus and Pepito burst out of their chests and it’s all 'MORTAL KOMBAT!'” He flailed around with his imaginary action figures, before plopping down onto a couch cushion. The key to Hell, which Johnny wore as part of a necklace, slid on its ribbon to the back of Johnny’s neck.

“Wow, I’m fucked up,” he said, half laughing.

“You get points for something, though what I have no idea.”

Edgar adored him, but Edgar was also a chicken. He’d do it soon. He heard somewhere that it’s easier to admit a thing to a person with an audience to witness it, and even though he doubted it highly, he suspected that was how he’d have to ask.

*****

 

“So we need to come up with something amazing,” Johnny said. Johnny, Devi, Tenna and Jimmy were sitting in the van, headed back out on the road for another run of shows. Johnny thought that they needed some sort of spark or spice to what they were doing. He could feel like a god on stage, but that wasn’t getting people’s attention. He wanted people to feel what he did, wanted to make them see.

But people didn’t see the way he did, so he was going to have to work around it.

“I think we’re pretty amazing as we are,” Devi said, uninterested.

“Yeah, but we could do something weirder,” Johnny said. “We need a bus,” he added.

“I don’t think I can drive a bus,” Tenna said.

“What? Why?”

“I think you need another license for that, don’t you? I mean that’s kind of… illegal…,” she trailed off as the others glared at her. “Yeah, you’re right. No one will notice.”

“We could cause a ten-car pile-up and no one would see it,” Jimmy said, clearly enthralled by the idea.

“Funny how that works, what with us being sort of famous and all,” Devi said.

“It will,” Johnny said. And he knew it would, and because he knew it would, it would. And that was it.

“Still, some kind of attention thing,” Johnny continued.

“Like a publicity stunt?” Devi asked. 

“Yeah, something like sacrificing bunnies to Pepito, only not so messy,” Johnny said.

The door opened just then, and Edgar leaned into the van.

“Nny,” he said, before anyone could even say hello, “Would you ever consider dating me?”

The van was quiet for a moment, and Johnny felt Jimmy’s rage from across the van. Despite Jimmy’s wrath, Johnny was pretty sure that Edgar was utterly brilliant. That was it.

“I think you might be onto something there, Edgar.” 

Jimmy stood up to scream something and slammed his head on the roof of the van.

*****

After the ‘formal homicidal orgy’ poster, Johnny moved to kick start things. His goal was to leave people as confused as possible anytime the band got some publicity. Edgar was amazingly easy to convince to do just about anything. He’d hold hands in downtown shopping districts, and he’d hug Johnny without even being asked. He’d stare adoringly when even Johnny forgot to keep up appearances.

It was pretty convincing. 

“I’m impressed that you’re this receptive to this, really,” Johnny had said to Edgar once, as they glanced through a cheap China Town, arm in arm, in some city far away from home.

“I could say the same,” Edgar had replied.

And so that was that. After a few boundaries had been set (“No groping, kay thanks.”) everything was perfect. People asked questions, or looked confused, or, in some cases, squealed breathlessly. The squealing had really freaked him out at first, but after a while, Johnny started to bow or smile knowingly at the squealers, which sent them into further fits. Edgar even seemed to enjoy messing with them. 

Being perceived as in a relationship with Edgar didn’t bother Johnny. When they were done with this game and decided they wanted another stunt to mess with people, it would just cease to be. No one would remember it anyway, and if they did, it would just be in the form of fan sites on the internet and the thoughts of teenage girls. Nothing was permanent, so it didn’t matter.

“You should have told me you were this cool a lot earlier, Edgar.”

“I wish I could have.”

Johnny had to admit that this was not the way most pairs of best friends did things. He wasn’t sure if Devi and Tenna would ever pull something like this, or even if he himself would have, had it been several years ago. Johnny just trusted Edgar’s sense of humor, and really, trusted him not to go overboard on all this bullshit. He figured it just meant they were really close best friends, though when he tried to say ‘more like brothers’ in his head, he realized he would transcend some levels of fucked up that even he wasn’t comfortable with. He didn’t even think ‘brothers’ was accurate.

Johnny’s favorite incident regarding Edgar was in front of the drink machines at a gigantic convenience store. This store was the kind with lights that lit up the town around it for blocks, even at two in the morning, when Johnny and the rest of the van dwellers decided to stop. Most people in the store recognized The Homicides before they even set foot through the doors, and those that didn’t recognize them simply couldn’t see them. Johnny had had an intense craving for whatever they called Freezies in whatever part of the country they were in, and dragged Edgar with him to look at the selection.

“Where did they even come up with these flavors?” Edgar said, looking up and down the wall of Freezy machines.

“Beats me,” Johnny answered. “Do you think there’s sugar in this?” He asked, poking a window to some brownish fluid. “Peanut strikes me as hard to freeze and liquefy.”

“Tell me this doesn’t really say ‘ham,’” Edgar said a few moments later, after he’d walked the length of the gigantic machine and been stunned by one particular flavor.

Johnny slid up next to him and regarded the sticker. “Would you feel better if I told you that I have a gravy one on the other end?” he asked.

“Ugh, no. I think I’d prefer the ham.”

“I don’t get it,” Johnny said, “Doesn’t anyone drink fucking fruit anymore?”

“Nny,” Devi said, leaning over from the hot tea dispenser, “there is nothing on this planet that could convince me that the ones you drank at home had any fruit content.”

“Does no one drink highly processed fructose syrup made to ensure that children have no idea what real fruit tastes like anymore?!” Johnny yelled.

“How do you feel about drinking it with the souls of the damned?” Edgar asked.

Johnny turned around, interested. “Oooooh, go on,” he said.

“‘Cherry Doom,’ Edgar read from the label. “ ‘All the sugar you need for a whole week, and at least three damned souls in every medium-sized cup!’”

“I would have driven across the whole country for just that, I think,” Johnny said, gleefully eyeing the sticker, and pulling a cup from the top of the stack.

“Speak for yourself,” Tenna grumbled from the snack aisle.

It was about then that Johnny felt something turn toward him. He stopped filling the cup, dripping part of the neon-colored ice on his hand, and looked around wildly.

“Whoa, Nny, what the hell? What’s wrong?” He thought Edgar had said that, but he wasn’t sure.

The cameras in the store, Johnny realized, had been turned on them, and most of the management staff was staring at them as well. Jimmy was saying something, but Johnny didn’t notice what.

“That thar,” the overweight man who had previously been behind a cash register said, “is the elixir of the devil.” He pointed shakily at the cup in Johnny’s hand.

Devi set her tea down and put her hands on her hips. “You’ve got to be kidding me, that’s what this is all ab-?”

Johnny held up a hand to silence her.

“Keep talking,” he said to the blubbery man.

“It’s only those been touched by the devil himself can touch that stuff… you people…,” the man pointed vaguely at all of them, even Jimmy, who was in the far end of the store where they kept the Holy Grail of energy drinks. “You people, are the devil’s people.”

Somewhere between the pork rinds and the cheese curls, Tenna’s forehead and palm became closely acquainted.

“So what you’re telling me,” Johnny said, still holding the cup as he glided closer to the man and his shaking teenage employees, “is that I’ve been touched by Satan.”

“Y-yes,” the man answered, quivering.

“That seems funny to me,” Johnny said, tossing a straw from a nearby counter into the cup, “because I was pretty sure that the guy I met wasn’t Satan, weren’t you Edgar?” He turned to Edgar, grinning. 

“I think that’s what he said, yeah,” Edgar answered.

“You people all been fooled! You-you jus’ stay back now! We’re gonna bring th’ Father ou’ here an’, an’ this’ll all-!”

“No, no,” Johnny said, circling the man once, before returning to standing beside Edgar, “There won’t be any need for that.” Devi, Jimmy and Tenna moved near them, holding a collection of snacks. 

“What a relief that we’re all such good people, here,” Johnny said, smiling slyly, one hand clutching the offending drink, the other running painted nails down the back of Edgar’s neck. “I don’t suppose Satan’s son would have liked me enough to give me Edgar here if I wasn’t a good person.”

Several people made flailing signs that Johnny took to be the cross, which just added to the game. Johnny took a long sip of the Cherry Doom drink before going on.

“Yes, it is a relief, isn’t it?” he continued, still grinning. Then, in one motion, he tugged Edgar’s shirt, and kissed him. 

Several people ran from the store.

Only when the video from the security camera aired on TV, and everywhere on the internet, did Johnny see the details behind him and notice Devi look ill, Tenna look smug, and Jimmy crush the can he was holding in his hands.

*****

Edgar spent all his time in a half-dazed state. He could feel dizzy at one moment, and positively empowered the next. People he didn’t know asked him about kissing Johnny in that giant store, and Edgar could never tell them what it was like more than “cherry.” He knew, but there weren’t words for it. It was something he sort of dreamed of, but was even too embarrassed to do in dreams. Johnny and kissing didn’t seem to fit together at all.

Until he got to do it of course.

After the Cherry Doom incident, Edgar handled Johnny’s occasional stints of singing in Edgar’s direction perfectly. They made him play better if anything. The audience was negligible – Edgar was playing for Johnny.

All their time in front of cameras was spent with Johnny attached to his arm. Edgar smiled at people now, not in the ‘polite for the camera’ way, but in the ‘I have something you want’ way. Edgar was pretty sure that Johnny was doing the same thing – when Edgar looked at some of the pictures that ran through the media, Johnny had some look in his eyes that Edgar couldn’t quite identify. It was sharp, and piercing, but it was definitely a smile.

Possessive? Edgar could only pretend. Yes, Johnny had some sort of claim to him, but Johnny was pretty free with weaving around between other band members too, and obviously had no concern for Edgar ever doing the same. It wasn’t possessive. The look was something familiar, so Edgar took it be the same look he assumed he was giving the audiences. 

Nothing else really made sense to him.

Things were entirely comfortable. This relationship with Johnny felt more like being best friends who got to kiss on television occasionally, but was completely wonderful just the same. Edgar could do all the things he never realized he wanted to do with virtually no risk of total rejection. Johnny never flinched in the face of the extra attention – he even took to being held in some fashion or another while the band sat talking about the success or failure of the make-up, or the ‘killing,’ or the outfits or anything else that Tenna was in charge of, usually. (“Do you guys want make-up tomorrow?” “Who else here can drive, hmm? Anyone?”)

He felt a little bad for Tenna.

*****

 

“Stop moving or the slash’ll go through your nipple.”

“I can’t help it; I just get so- rrg!” Jimmy grunted angrily at nothing and slammed his back into the chair he was propped up in. Tenna stuck her lower lip out, irritated, waiting for Jimmy to stop writhing so she could finish applying the ‘I’ve been slashed’ make-up to his chest.

“I knew it was going to be trouble from the beginning, you know? I knew Edgar was going to come in and just steal him from everyone.”

“You seem to be in a band with him now, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“That’s not the fucking same! You know what I mean!”

“Of course. Hold still, or this wax goes up your nose.”

\---

“He’s completely pathetic, Ten. You should see the way this has gone right to his head.”

“I actually do his makeup too, you know.”

“He’s all soupy eyed half the time. How do you even play when you have soup for insides, really? I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a bunch of ramen inside him. Ever since Nny started this crazy publicity thing, Edgar is all loopy about him.” Devi took a deep breath.

“Uh-huh,” Tenna answered, blending some black circles around Devi’s eyes.

“He’s crazy about him. It’s obvious. It’s written all over him. It SEEPS out of him, like some kinda oozing boil. Like sappy SPEW.”

“Poetry, Devi, really.”

\---

“My god, you have no idea, he’s just… I can’t even come up with a word. He’s just this amazing – Man, I wish I had some way to explain this, you know? Like, suddenly, something I think I was really supposed to do has finally worked out for me and for everyone else, and my GOD he is amazing.”

Tenna sighed and continued radiating the lines for Edgar’s stitches from his bellybutton. She held some black thread in her mouth, and made some kind of grunt that she hoped sounded either positive or at least like she had been paying attention. She really didn’t understand why he needed to keep up the act in front of her.

“I never thought to just come right out and ASK. How dumb is that? All this time, we could have been – well, no, I guess not all this time, but a while, right?” Edgar half laughed and then gazed dreamily at the ceiling. He looked like a twelve-year-old girl with a goatee. Tenna rolled her eyes and nodded.

“He’s amazing,” Edgar said to the ceiling. He looked like something had just been lifted from him on the last syllable.

Tenna stabbed him in the stomach with her needle.

“Oh, sorry,” she said when he yelped, “must’ve slipped.”

\---

Johnny had shown up with some make-up already done.

“Does this look dead enough to you, Tenna?”

“God, Nny, I love you,” Tenna said, relieved.

“Oh, shut up,” Johnny said, waving his hand as he dropped into ‘the makeover chair’, “Since when have I ever done anything to make people love me?”

Minutes later, Tenna rammed some eye shadow into his eye.

 

*****

 

Edgar relished every moment of every day anymore. He couldn’t believe he used to spend all his time being bored and waiting for school to start again, or wishing he had someone to talk to. Now, at nearly every possible moment, he had Johnny with him.

Johnny teased him on stage, in front of how ever many hundred people had made it to the concert that week. Johnny sang certain lyrics right to him, or right through him, as far as Edgar could feel, and frequently ‘killed’ Edgar last in the black shows. Edgar felt a little strange about that making him feel good, but it really did.

Edgar himself once stopped the show entirely to make some little speech about how much he adored Johnny. He’d heard Jimmy rake his fingers over his guitar strings, and Devi’s forehead hit one of her drums, but they’d disappeared quickly. The speech had been short, and, Edgar liked to think, charming, but he wasn’t sure. Time went so differently for him when he even glanced at Johnny. Johnny had seemed amused and receptive, perhaps even charmed by the whole thing, so Edgar had had nothing but encouragement.

When the traveling halted for a few weeks, Edgar entertained fantasies of what his life would be like back home. He wouldn’t even have to ask Johnny where he wanted to stay, he’d be able to slide close to him on the couch and watch infomercials and maybe they’d just fall asleep there together.

He was quiet for most of the ride home, and save for holding Johnny’s hand as often as Johnny would let him, he had little contact with anyone, despite them being mere feet away.

 

*****

When the van finally pulled into the school parking lot at something like four in the afternoon, Johnny sat for a time just staring out of the window at the playground next door. A few moments later, Jimmy elbowed him.

“Hey, you’re home, get out. The rest of us want to get back, too.”

Johnny shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m going back with Edgar.”

He felt warmth radiate from both Jimmy and Edgar the moment the last syllable left his mouth, but he wasn’t able to pick up on what they really meant – the road had left him a little groggy.

Tenna started the van again, and Devi said something under her breath. Johnny didn’t care what it was.

He’d come to see Edgar’s house as closer to home than the choir room years ago. That, and it was just more practical to live with Edgar than in the school where a large portion of the student body now knew who he was. How Tenna and Jimmy even thought that he’d be able to live there, let alone sleep there, he had no idea.

A few blocks later, Tenna dropped them off, and Edgar and Johnny stood on the sidewalk in front of Edgar’s house in silence.

“Nny? Are you alright?”

“Yes. Just thinking.”

“Can you give me a hand with these?” Edgar held a few of their bags, and nodded toward the remaining ones at Johnny’s feet.

Johnny picked up the last two bags and walked into the house. They hadn’t locked it.

The house was untouched, as Johnny knew it would be. He suspected that maybe Pepito had visited once or twice, because the air felt different, but nothing was missing or broken. He expected a visit from Pepito later tonight, in fact, just because he had come home.

Edgar clamored into the doorway with most of the bags, and knocked a few things off the wall in the process of squeezing into the living room.

“How is it that we even still have windows?” Edgar asked. “I thought people would have ransacked the place by the time we got back.”

“Don’t you have some kind of divine protection, Edgar?”

“Maybe,” Edgar answered, putting a small bag on the footrest that sat beside the couch. “I just thought some kind of ‘God only helps those who help themselves’ thing would have played out here.”

“The remaining strings of faith you put in that guy astound me.”

“Hey, you were the one who suggested divine protection.”

“I just thought it would make you feel better than knowing Pepito probably had a hand in it.”

Edgar looked a little nervous. “Had a hand in it, how?”

Johnny sometimes forgot that Edgar didn’t feel things the way he did.

“He’s paranoid,” Johnny said. This wasn’t the most accurate answer, but it would do.

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand your relationship with him. I was so sure you hated him for a while.”

“I don’t like him. This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t keep him on the radar. He still knows a lot.”

“Does all this still bother you?” Edgar asked, sitting on the arm of the couch.

“Sometimes. There’s just enough that he didn’t tell me that I feel I could live without knowing it, but-”

He was cut off when Edgar hugged him.

“Don’t think too hard about it, please. I don’t want to go through you thinking that you’ll stab me in my sleep again.”

Johnny slid out of the hug with no effort at all, leaving Edgar with a baffled expression. He seemed stunned that Johnny wasn’t still tucked in his arms.

“It’s fine,” Johnny said, holding up his hand to stop Edgar’s questioning, “Don’t worry about it. I’m okay.”

Publicity stunt or no, no one had ever given as much of a damn about Johnny as Edgar had. The problem there being that Johnny wasn’t sure, still, that he wanted Edgar to care at all. He worried about hurting him; he worried about the pain that Pepito had promised. Edgar wasn’t Johnny’s lover, or his brother, or anything more than his best friend, but Johnny worried that even that amount of close was enough to trigger Pepito’s little prophesy of doom.

He didn’t remember when he started thinking of it as something he could trigger.

Johnny felt a weight on his head, and his eyes refocused. Edgar ran his fingers from the top of Johnny’s head, and off to one side, tucking one long bit of blue hair out of the way of Johnny’s eye.

“I’m going to make something to eat,” Edgar said, gently. “Do you want anything?”

Johnny looked questioningly at Edgar, but shook it off after a moment.

“Sure, I’ll have something. Whatever we have is fine.”

 

*****

 

Edgar threw together whatever he could find in the kitchen that hadn’t expired or turned strange colors in the fridge over the time they’d been gone. This sadly meant that his usual fixation on making lots of egg based food was out of the question. He made some kind of soup instead. They had stockpiled cans and cans of beans for some mysterious reason, so the soup was more like bean dip when Edgar was finished with it, but it smelled edible, and that was really all Edgar had been aiming for.

He threw some of the soup dip into some bowls that weren’t growing things in the sink, and found the tray he usually took things out to the other room on. Some strange part of him really loved the domestic feeling. Most of the time, it was necessity – you had to eat sometime- but this felt nice. This was doing something good, and he was excited about doing it for some reason.

Edgar carried the bowls on the tray into the other room, careful not to ram it into anything or trip over the bags he’d left in the entry way. He bent over to put the tray on the arm of the couch where Johnny sat, and again moved some hair from Johnny’s face. Johnny jumped a little.

“Hey, I think it’s food,” Edgar said. “I’m not sure, since I sort of made it up, but I think it will be edible.”

“Damn, you’re really into this.”

“Of course, I- what?”

Johnny leaned back into the couch cushion to steer his gaze around the tray Edgar was holding and into Edgar’s face.

“You’re really into this,” Johnny waved his hand, “whole production.”

Edgar blinked. “There’s no production… what are you talking about? The food?”

“Seriously,” Johnny said, laughing, “You can stop. No one can see us in here. You don’t need to be in character for the camera all the time.”

“I don’t think I understand,” Edgar said slowly, setting the tray on the table in front of Johnny.

“The you an’ me thing. It’s not like they bugged the house or anything. You don’t have to act all the time.”

“You…” Edgar took a step back. “Wait, you’re not really…?”

Edgar saw Johnny’s eyes go wide.

“You weren’t acting?” Johnny asked, just above a whisper.

“… and you were…” Edgar managed, drawing his hand to his forehead.

“Oh. Oh shit, Edgar, I-”

Edgar didn’t know how to feel. He felt betrayed and lied to when the exchange he’d just had clearly indicated no betrayal had happened. He felt embarrassed that he’d fussed and been as devoted as he thought Johnny could tolerate. And to find out now that it had all been just grand acting on Johnny’s part.

This was some kind of comedy of errors. Pepito was going to come in through the fireplace and pronounce them bound by the souls in a union from Hell any moment. The God that had granted him the house and the book and the everything was playing a joke, and that God surely was going to grant him the thing that made him happiest in the world after just one more moment of suffering.

The laugh track would echo through Edgar’s house as Johnny said ‘gotcha!’ and they’d be fine. They’d go upstairs and sleep and Edgar would be awakened by the ghost of Christmas Past, who would tell him about how he’d fixed everything that had destroyed Johnny’s past lives, and that they would both be living in some kind of musical paradise for the rest of their afterlives. And they’d play Trivial Pursuit. Or maybe Scrabble.

“Edgar, say something. Are you alright?”

Or he’d just be standing here, too shattered to do anything but think about how shattered he was.

“Nny, I… God, I’m such an idiot. How could I have…? What happened?” He raised his head from his palms, and was met with the most concerned expression he’d ever seen on Johnny’s face.

“… I don’t know,” Johnny sounded almost panicked. “We were talking about publicity stunts, you came in an-”

“You were? Oh, GOD, I’m so stu- Ugh.” Too much was going through Edgar’s head at once.

“Yeah, we were. I didn’t know you didn’t know.” Johnny really sounded concerned.

“I don’t even… How could you? No. How could I? God, this is-” Edgar’s voice broke off and he choked a bit on his own vocal cords. He had to move, had to think, had to something. He moved into the little used dining room and just shivered, bracing himself on the back of a chair.

He heard the tray fall in the other room and then he could feel Johnny standing at the bottom of the stairs, staring at his back.

“Edgar.”

Hearing Johnny’s voice sound concerned and knowing that everything had been faked made him want to start sobbing.

“Edgar, come on,” Johnny repeated again.

“No, no, just stop it. Stop. Talking.”

“Edgar, listen to me.”

“Stop! Stop! Just shut up! I can’t stand hearing you like-”

They stood for a moment, Edgar leaning into the defenseless chair, and Johnny still under the archway into the dining room, at the bottom of the stairs.

“Like what?” Johnny said, after the pause.

Edgar took several breaths to attempt to gain control of his lungs. “Like you’re still acting,” he managed.

“I don’t have to be acting to give a shit.”

“I know,” Edgar said, replacing any pause in his speech with a sniffle, “but I keep, I keep feeling like it’s still... Still. And I can’t. I re-remember that you don’t, really, and-”

“So I have to be ‘Press Johnny’ to – fucking key – to give a damn, now, is that it? Woe is you, I’m not really madly in love with you so anything I say is faked, is it? You’re not even fucking listening to me, Edgar!”

“Yes, I AM!”

“Then fucking look at me, okay?”

Edgar felt a wave of resentment pass over him. How often had Johnny imparted important things to Edgar or, less often, Edgar had said something important, and Johnny had been deeply engrossed in wood grain. Edgar looked anyway.

“I am sorry,” Johnny said. “I wish I’d known. I’d never have done any of it if I had.”

Edgar’s eyes blurred. He still couldn’t get over that the concern he was hearing wasn’t a lover’s anymore. And that it never really had been. For a few glorious moments, he’d been happy and he’d made Johnny happy and he thought it was perfect even if it was full of more holes than anything he’d ever sewn together.

And Johnny was-. Yes.

That word he’d thought so many times over the years of knowing him.

He was flawed. More than anyone Edgar knew, really. He was frightening, and got carried away and used to be insane and might still be heading in that direction and he had been brutal to Edgar in the beginning and Edgar couldn’t care, as much as he’d tried. Even vomiting in the bathroom two years ago wasn’t bad enough to scare Edgar away – and Edgar hadn’t even admitted anything to himself back then.

“It’s okay,” Edgar said, out of habit, in response to the apology.

“No,” Johnny said, “It’s really not. Look at you, for fuck’s sake, you’re a disaster.”

Edgar wanted to quip ‘Love you, too’ in return, but the thought of it just stabbed him in the stomach.

“This doesn’t just rework everything you thought was true, you know?” Johnny said. “I have to process that my best friend was serious when he said and did…all of that.”

Edgar stared at Johnny. So Johnny kept going.

“I don’t know what to do with it, now. I should have some kind of ripoff fortune cookie thing to give you here, but I- I can only think of how often Devi used to say ‘They say you should always fall in love with your best friend’ when we were really young. I used to tease her about Tenna when she said that stuff,” Johnny scratched at something on his jaw. “This is karma kicking my ass for that. Pretty sure.”

“I’m glad that I’m a kick in the ass, Nny, really. You’re a miracle with that comforting thing. How do you do it?”

Johnny glared at Edgar, but didn’t blow up at him. Edgar had to pry his muscles out of ‘Nny Is Screaming At Me’ mode when Johnny continued normally.

“I’m willing to try it again,” Johnny said.

“You’re willing to tear me up again? That’s nice.”

“Fuck you. I meant for real. I’d try it again, if you wanted to.”

“Accomplishing what, exactly?”

“You’re not listening to me. I am saying I won’t fake it.”

“But you don’t-”

“No. I don’t. Not yet, anyway.” Johnny moved forward for the first time since the conversation had started, and Edgar felt muscles tense again. “Show me what this shit is supposed to be like.”

“I think that’s what I just did.”

“But this time, I know you’re serious. I don’t feel the way you do – so you’ve got to give me a reason to.”

Edgar could not even believe that he was hearing correctly.

“And you want to do… all of that, again?” he asked.

“Not want so much. ‘Am willing.’”

“A pity date.”

“Curiosity.”

Edgar half smiled.

“Ego,” he said.

“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t want worship that you don’t remember earning,” Johnny answered. He had something reminiscent of a sneer creeping from the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah, yeah. But I’m not doing this just to give you some kinda boost, Nny.”

“I can get that anytime I want. The last way I should be trying to get it is having my male best friend all over me. I’m offering. Not much to lose here.”

“I can’t.”

“Do you remember when I first came here, Edgar?”

“Of course I do,” Edgar said, rubbing his arm.

“I asked you who I was. What you were looking at. What you saw. The context was arguably different then, but you told me to wait until you could answer it better.”

Edgar swallowed.

“And I’m done waiting, and you’ve had years to pass your judgment, so I’m asking again: Who am I, Edgar? What do you see?”

Edgar shuddered. “I can’t,” he said. He stood leaning on the chair for several moments. He kept uttering half formed words about why he couldn’t tell Johnny what he saw. He had no idea how torturous it would be to have Johnny just care. Telling Johnny why he cared, and how much he cared, and what made him care, and what he cared about more and more every time he –

“I can’t.” He said again.

Johnny tapped his foot – click, click – on the floor.

“I see,” Edgar said to the floor, “I see you. I see the person I was supposed to save, but at the same time…” Edgar looked up. Johnny looked a little wary, and had stopped tapping, but wasn’t going anywhere, so Edgar continued. “I see someone amazing and talented and confusing and frightening and intriguing and-” He stopped. It was that word. That same thing he’d been unable to say even to himself for so many years.

“And incredible,” Edgar finished, flinching. He was pretty sure Johnny was going to hightail it to the next county, but Edgar didn’t even hear him move.

“Alright, then,” Johnny said slowly, after a moment’s reflection. “So, you’re looking at me like that, and you don’t want-“

“I do!” Edgar interrupted. “That’s the problem, I think. I’d- I would love to go back to- but I can’t. I just- Can you let me think about it?”

“Yeah.”

“I just don’t want to get my hopes up or have this whole thing happen again,” Edgar said, brushing some hair out of his face.

“I wouldn’t be tricking you into it again, Edgar. Have some faith, please,” Johnny said, sounding mildly disgusted. “I can’t promise you anything but that I’m not going to fuck with your head.”

“You just want me to try to persuade you to fall for me with no idea of my odds of success. Great.”

Johnny crossed his arms. “Edgar. You are my best friend. I pulled a publicity stunt involving us in a relationship for months. I let you kiss me on TV. Multiple times. How many other people do you think I’m that close to? Whatever. You think about it, I’m getting a drink.” Johnny walked past Edgar and nearly into the kitchen before Edgar grabbed his arm.

“Okay,” he said, as though Johnny leaving the room would cancel the offer. “Okay, I’ll- Let’s do it. It’s like… some kind of courtship thing or something.”

Johnny half laughed. “Alright, okay. But I need to get some sorta rules out of the way here or something, okay?” he said, pulling himself from the grip Edgar forgot he had on him. “No pouncing on me, slobbering on me, or raping me in my sleep,” he recited, counting them out on his fingers.

“Nny, please. Did I do anything like that before?” Edgar asked, narrowing his eyes.

“No, but that’s because I wasn’t letting you, since I thought it was all faked, remember? Within reason, for the confines of this experiment, you do whatever you see fit for some kinda,” he waved his hands in circles, “love thing, or whatever. And, within reason again, I let you.”

“O…kay.”

Johnny let out a long breath, then shrugged and scratched at the back of his head. “I guess give me some warning. I mean, when you decide to start ‘Courting Nny’ mode.”

Edgar, in a flash of boldness, grabbed Johnny’s hand as he was bringing it down from scratching his head. Johnny looked a little stunned, but didn’t move or say anything. 

“Is this good?” Edgar asked. Before he really realized what he was doing, he’d brought one of Johnny’s knuckles to his lips.

“Yeah,” Johnny said with a moment of tensing up, “Yeah, that looks about adequate.”

“That’ll do, pig,” Edgar quoted, still with Johnny’s hand against his lips.

“Oh, you’re hilarious. Let me go so I can get my drink?”

“Sure,” Edgar said, releasing his hand. Something about this entire situation was more than awkward, but Edgar suddenly felt that he relished the challenge. He was a bit intimidated, and more than a little terrified, but looked forward to seeing where this all went.

Edgar worried that Johnny’s senses would be more alert now, or that everything would just have eighty levels of awkward to it, but he was now charged with being as charming as possible without being a complete fuck up. He was excited about it, but also felt something in his stomach react anytime he saw Johnny for the rest of the evening, as though he thought Johnny suspected some kind of romantic gesture every time they breathed the same air.

Johnny acted remarkably normal. Or maybe he wasn’t acting. Maybe he just was normal. Either way, Edgar resented it – he felt car sick.

Edgar piled the rest of the soup dip disaster into a bowl and carried it back out into the living room. He had a dining room, but he’d never used it. He even had to walk through it to get to the living room, but it never even struck him to use it. And, since he’d been hysterical in the room an hour ago, he didn’t suspect he’d want to eat there anytime soon.

Johnny had plugged something musical into something else. All Edgar really knew was that he could hear a faint song now.

“If I had a million dollars  
(If I had a million dollars)  
I'd buy you a house  
(I would buy you a house)”

Edgar recognized it as something Johnny had hummed to himself frequently on the road. It was mostly background noise, but it was nicer than pounding apocalypse music. Cheerier than most of Johnny’s collection, anyway.

“Here’s the rest of it, Nny.”

“Hey, it looks nicer when it’s not on the floor.”

“Imagine that.”

Edgar sat on the couch, himself on one end, Johnny on the other, to join in watching another round of removing paint from furniture, but didn’t feel up to eating or playing the ‘Guess What Color Is Under That One?’ or “How Many Colors Until Mauve?’ games. He just felt awkward. He sighed, sitting at an end of the couch that he felt pretty sure no one had been on for years.

“If I had a million dollars  
I'd build a tree fort in our yard  
If I had million dollars  
You could help, it wouldn't be that hard”

“Hey.” Johnny’s voice interrupted Edgar’s thoughts of utterly nothing.

“Mm?” Edgar sounded distracted. Edgar was distracted.

“We’re still friends, Edgar.”

“I- I know.”

“What I mean is: If you’re going to do…whatever this is called, you don’t need to go backwards. I’m not going to attack you.”

“I’m not sure I underst-” Edgar started, before Johnny glared at him. Johnny always said Edgar was a fucking miserable liar. “I’m sorry,” Edgar corrected, looking at his hands. “I just don’t know what I should be doing.”

“You’d know more than me, I think,” Johnny said.

“No, really, I have no idea what you’re expecting or what I should be doing or anything.”

“Heh, I almost blamed this on you,” Johnny said, with a trace laugh.

“S’cuse me?”

“I almost said, ‘It was your idea! You figure it out!’ But yeah. Me this time.” Johnny let out some air in what sounded like frustration. “What sort of guidance are you looking for there, Grasshopper?”

Edgar half smiled.

“Tell me what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“I don’t think I can.”

Edgar sighed, and put his head in his hands.

“I can tell you what you’re not supposed to be doing, though,” Johnny said, “I think it’s a shorter list.”

Edgar looked up at him. Johnny had pulled his legs to his chest, and took up barely half the cushion he was sitting on. He was also looking at Edgar, expectantly.

“If I had a million dollars  
We wouldn't have to walk to the store  
If I had a million dollars  
we'd take a limousine 'cause it costs more  
If I had a million dollars  
We wouldn't have to eat Kraft Dinner  
But we would eat Kraft Dinner  
Of course we would, we’d just eat more”

 

“Oh, um, yeah. That would be,” he paused, trying to think of a good word. He didn’t think of one. “…nice.”

“Don’t forget that we’re friends,” Johnny said. “I didn’t come to your house back when you first passed out on us looking for a guy to fawn all over me.” He smiled. “I already had one of those.”

Edgar managed half a nervous smile.

“Don’t do anything too fast, or anything too drastic without warning. If you wouldn’t do it to some stranger you just bought a drink for, it might not work in your favor here.”

“I don’t want to announce every move I’m making, Nny.”

“People don’t come with manuals, Edgar,” Johnny answered, sounding annoyed. “I’m giving you a chance; I already told you I can’t promise anything.”

Edgar slid over to the middle cushion. Johnny leaned into the arm of the couch slightly, but otherwise didn’t move.

“Alright,” Edgar said, running his hand through his hair. “I don’t know what was wrong with me there. I’ve never sat at the other end when you were over here… I didn’t want to come on too strong, I guess.”

“Back, you fiend,” Johnny said mockingly, making shooing motions at Edgar, “I do believe you plan to jump me in the night.”

“Oh yes, definitely. My motives are most certainly unclean.”

Johnny grinned. “That’s better already,” he said.

“Careful,” Edgar said, “I could be rabid.”

“My god, the scandal,” Johnny deadpanned, “Whatever will I do? To think that he’d bite me.”

“Don’t tempt me, you bastard.”

“That would be in the ‘drastic things with no warning’ category, Edgar.”

“So it’s okay if I warn you first?”

“I don’t think I want to answer that.”

“I am biting your arm!’ Edgar announced, grabbing Johnny’s arm at the wrist and elbow. Johnny tried to tear away from him and nearly leapt over the arm of the couch. Edgar let go, of course, amused.

“You didn’t think I was serious, did you?” Edgar asked, laughing.

“Let me see you not try to run when some guy wants to snack on your arm, and then I’ll tell you.”

“Fine, fine,” Edgar said, waving his hand dismissively. “Is there anything else I should be wary of in all this?”

Johnny shrugged. “Common sense is nice, but, you know, whatever. We don’t deal in that here.”

“I’m being serious, Nny, come on.”

“I don’t think there’s anything else to tell, really.”

“So,” Edgar said, “if I do this…” He reached over, and touched only Johnny’s cheek. Johnny jumped, just a little.

“You’ll do that,” Edgar finished, sitting back and releasing a frustrated breath.

“Of course I will when it’s without warning!”

“Do you really want to do this?”

“If I had a million dollars  
I’d buy your love”

Johnny sneered. “You didn’t listen to me,” he said. “Say you’re – No, never mind. I can’t even believe I was going to keep going with that.” He looked off into the corner of the room, beyond the pink recliner.

“With what?”

“I shouldn’t really have to tell you all of this. If-” He stopped, hand in the air, mid-gesture of annoyance. “If you really feel the way you kept telling me you did, you know, before today, then this should not be hard for you. I was just going to try to coach you in it for some fucked up reason, apparently.”

Edgar sighed. This was more complicated than he had anticipated, and he kept making a disaster out of it. He looked at Johnny, who raised an eyebrow at him. He made a move to slide closer, but stopped mid-motion.

“May I?”

Johnny shrugged. “Sure.”

Edgar sat as close as he felt he was allowed, then picked Johnny’s hand up and interlaced their fingers. Edgar could feel a pulse in their palms, but wasn’t sure who it belonged to.

“I’m sorry,” Edgar said. “I’ll stop screwing this up now, promise. Tolerate me for a day or so while I adjust?”

Johnny regarded their hands, and curled his fingers, gripping Edgar’s hand.

“Alright,” he said, “But don’t use it as an excuse to do stupid shit - I know when you lie.”

“Trust me, I know,” Edgar said, relieved. He wanted to mention that he thought his hand would be singed off if he ever let go of Johnny’s. He wanted to talk about how his skin had always burned like this when Johnny got close enough to touch. He wanted to say he liked Johnny’s hands, long fingers and flaking nail polish from the last show and all.

“Nny, how do you feel about compliments?” Edgar asked, studying Johnny’s knuckles.

“In the current context, I’m assuming.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m morbidly curious and entirely afraid to know what you could have to say at the same time.”

“I thought that might be the case.”

“‘Light dressing on the side.’ I don’t need to hear how awesome I am all the time,” Johnny said, smirking.

“Thank you for taking this so well,” Edgar said, almost too driven to not screw up to laugh at Johnny’s dressing remark. “And for giving me the chance to fuck it up all over again.”

“What are friends for?” Sarcasm.

“Courting, apparently,” Edgar said.

Johnny clicked his tongue. “Uh-huh.”

“If I had a million dollars”

“Don’t let me do anything too stupid, okay?” Edgar half-pleaded, holding Johnny’s hand a little closer to his chest.

“Hey, you’re on your own there, Prince Charming. I’m not your fairy godmother.”

“You do realize you just made yourself the Princess, though, right?”

Johnny smiled. “That just means my outfit looks better than yours, I get to sing, I’m on all the merchandise, I’m in another castle, and I have animal friends.”

Edgar couldn’t help but laugh. 

“I love you,” he said, meant entirely in a ‘you’re awesome’ sort of way. He tensed up when he realized it had even come out, and looked at Johnny, biting his lip.

Johnny smiled at nothing, and then at Edgar’s hand clutching his own.

“I'd be rich”

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shreds of ‘If I Had A Million Dollars’ by Bare Naked Ladies. Doesn’t really follow the SWAN song formula, but it has something about it that works.
> 
> ‘Confrontation’ from Jekyll and Hyde, sung by Anthony Warlow is also in there. The average mood of these together will probably work out for the chapter, yes?


	18. Behind Your Skin

It really was curiosity. Some kind of grand experiment. There were no elaborate fantasies or expectations of anything on Johnny’s part, just curiosity. After the awkward ‘best friend is in love with me’ feelings settled, it seemed logical to try to pick at it. To see what was in it and what made it tick and why it happened. To see if he could be taught to see it, or be shown it, or learn it.

“To see if he can seduce you,” Devi had said. “You’re fucktarded.”

“It’s not that,” Johnny had answered. “It’s experimenting.”

“That sounds worse, Nny.”

“Ugh, you’re horrible.”

“Why Johnny, that may be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Devi had told him she thought the idea was awful. Johnny had felt something like jealousy from her, but couldn’t pinpoint what about. He worried briefly about how Jimmy was going to react, and then wondered about Tenna. She was related somehow. Close enough to Devi that maybe the two of them could do the same thing that he and Edgar were.

Considering the possible consequences of doing so, it was collectively decided that Jimmy wouldn’t be hearing a word of these new developments. Devi had been against keeping it from him at first, but when Johnny mentioned the amount of trauma it would put Edgar through to know that Jimmy knew the real nature of things, she let it go. No one really wanted to see Jimmy trying to maul Edgar in the street, regardless of how much Tenna thought the tickets would go for.

Tenna had known about Edgar’s intense fondness for Johnny for quite some time.

“See, what gets me is that you didn’t know all that time,” she’d said.

“He’s Edgar, he’s my best friend, why would I have suspected?”

“That’s exactly why you should have suspected,” she’d answered, though she looked at Devi when she said it.

Johnny had, in a rare moment, felt sort of dumb for not noticing how fond Tenna was of Devi all that time.  Maybe he had a blindness towards this particular madness that was so obvious to other people in exchange for knowing everything else.

So with Jimmy oblivious, Devi reasonably tolerating, and Tenna wondering why it had taken so long to happen, Johnny was left to deal with Edgar’s fondness for him.  It didn’t bother him, and it didn’t repulse him, so it was a step in a direction. He couldn’t be sure if it was the ‘right direction,’ but it was one.  Edgar seemed very sincere about the entire thing, and Johnny had reason to believe that Edgar would not be as totally okay as he promised he would be if Johnny called the whole thing off and declared them simply friends. He wasn’t sure how he wanted this little ‘courtship’ thing to pan out, when he was honest with himself, but he thought that was acceptable. It meant that he was being at least marginally open-minded about it, and that seemed admirable to some degree.

Everything was ‘sort of,’ or ‘marginally’ or ‘kinda.’  It was better than ‘fuck no,’ though, so Johnny went with it.

Edgar was very cautious around Johnny for the first few weeks. Johnny appreciated this half of the time, and wanted to scream the other half. The ratio was really closer to 40/60, but he had gotten good at stopping himself.

“Okay, look,” Johnny said one day, when the ‘walking on eggshells’ act had gone on as long as he could stand. Edgar jumped considerably when Johnny spoke, so Johnny was fairly sure that Edgar could not handle much more of this bullshit either.

“Yes?”

“You can deal with a little risk. I have confidence in you. Really.”

Something seemed to just click in Edgar the moment the last syllable left Johnny’s mouth. He dropped onto the couch where Johnny had been sitting, and made a vague motion towards Johnny’s hand.

“May I?” he asked.

Johnny had looked at Edgar, at Edgar’s hand and back again a few times, then nodded.

“Yes,” he answered, and they watched some dumb bad movie while Edgar held Johnny’s hand. They made merciless fun of the movie, and Johnny forgot about Edgar’s hand almost entirely by the time they were half way through.

And it continued that way for weeks. After a while, Johnny would get used to something, and Edgar would gradually forget to ask permission. Edgar, it turned out, really radiated elation when he experienced it.  Johnny wondered why he’d been unable to sense it before.

Could have saved Edgar a lot of pain.

Pain still worried him. Pepito still worried him. The way Edgar looked at him, something else he had never noticed before, worried him.

Edgar had tried putting an arm over Johnny’s shoulders once. It had really been too much, and Johnny shrank away from it. Edgar backed off, of course, and Johnny had made sure to do something, laugh or smile or make some kind of joke, he didn’t really remember what, to make sure that Edgar didn’t feel terrible about it.

This part of the process really wasn’t supposed to be the two-way street, but it was more comfortable for both of them if Johnny did things to make Edgar feel better about everything.

Giving a shit about other people turned out to be work. That had honestly surprised him.

Edgar made nice things for Johnny. Took him places. Johnny appreciated the gestures of all of it, but felt like Edgar shouldn’t have taken the effort; Johnny never felt any different afterwards, even if Edgar beamed at him like maybe he should have. Johnny was as polite as he figured was appropriate, but he sometimes sat alone in the pink recliner or on his bed with his headphones, and wondered what the hell he was doing.

“May I?”  About coming close to Johnny’s hair or something this time. Johnny sometimes found that he couldn’t read some of Edgar’s intentions, but never wanted to ask for clarification. It was in the same vein as not letting him feel too discouraged about being rejected for something. This sort of defeated the purpose of the little questions in the first place, but for some reason, Johnny never altered the pattern. All in the interests of science.

Or something.

“Yes.” 

It turned out to be something like resting his cheek on the side of Johnny’s head. It wasn’t horrible. Johnny might not have said yes had he known that was coming, exactly, but he discovered that he was more tolerant than he previously imagined. Maybe as long as Edgar asked, Johnny was willing to try anything once. The very thought echoed in his head and kept him up for hours upon hours.

Weeks had worked Johnny into allowing his hand to be held, being hugged at random times, and even Edgar’s face in close proximity to his hair. He wasn’t sure what was so appealing about his hair, honestly, but whatever Edgar got out of it seemed to make him happy for days at a time, so Johnny let it go unmentioned.

“One of these days,” Edgar said once, his breath on Johnny’s scalp, “I’m going to bite your ear off, and you’ll never see it coming.”

“And I will haunt the shit out of you if I die from shock or blood loss. This will also not be happening ever again,” Johnny warned, motioning between the two of them. “And I will saw yours off in retaliation if I live.”

“I’d give it back,” Edgar muttered.

Times like that were why Johnny decided to let things go the way they were. It was still Edgar behind all that talk of adoring Johnny, and Johnny found he enjoyed the way they overlapped. Even if it still felt like a psychology project, watching Edgar react naturally to Johnny in two different ways was fascinating, and so, entirely welcome.

Finally, Edgar got into territory that Johnny couldn’t just mindlessly say ‘yes’ to. Edgar seemed to realize this and actually asked about these things well in advance.

How much was he allowed to say regarding how he felt?

How did Johnny feel hearing that Edgar actively wanted to kiss him?

The answers to those had been “Oh, god,” and “Oh, shit,” respectively. Edgar, brilliant as he was, understood every implication in those answers and said no more about either of them. Johnny felt both relieved and worried that he’d ruined Edgar’s enthusiasm. Edgar’s song, meanwhile, laced its way through everything and anything and it scared Johnny to hear one so clearly over another when he hadn’t been trying to.

The song bothered him. It was everywhere. Johnny was usually so good at letting them all blend into nothing, into static, into the background noise, into just the hum of the music machine, that when he could do nothing but feel it everywhere it made him a little panicky. He was nervous and jittery and had flashes of not knowing if Edgar was really Edgar.

_“Someone promised me the sky_  
 _a tunnel of white light_  
 _I never knew if they meant to kill me_  
 _But I suppose I’ll be alright_

_Sticks and stones could break my bones_  
 _If they were really there_  
 _As it is now I’m immortal_

_And until I find happy_  
 _I have nothing to fear”_

Everywhere and everywhere and everywhere and it never left him alone.  He understood for only a few moments how Edgar must have felt hearing Jimmy’s song roar through his speech, or hearing Devi’s peak up over her glares, or even Tenna’s suddenly dropping in from nowhere. The moment he thought of Devi and Tenna, he escaped. He tore out of the house and tried to out run the things he couldn’t stop hearing.

Clawed at Devi’s door. She screamed that she wasn’t signing anything, and that whoever was there could just go fuck themselves. It was Tenna that answered. She had never looked more like Johnny’s friend before.  Devi stood up from her chair across the room.

“Nny, what the hell are you doing?”

Escaping.

“Coming to visit.”

“Having trouble handling Edgar?” Tenna asked slyly. Johnny suspected that perhaps Tenna had been just as perceptive as he had been all these years, and maybe more so, considering his recent discovery of his blind spot.

“Maybe,” he answered.

“Awww,” Devi cooed in mock sympathy, “your little game backfire on you?”

“No,” Johnny answered, tucking himself into the corner of her couch. “I’m fine. I just needed to talk to some other people. I don’t get to talk to you guys when we can’t go to the school everyday.”

It was still there, that song, but it was so much lower now. He could breathe for a while. Devi’s stereo was on in the kitchen. Oh god, something else to concentrate on, thank you.

_“behind your face_  
 _behind your skin_  
 _behind you bones_  
 _look within”_

Johnny felt Tenna staring at him, he looked her in the eye and she bit her lip thoughtfully. Johnny raised an eyebrow at her, and she turned to Devi, who had been sewing something.

“I’m going to go pick up those eggs we needed,” she announced suddenly. “Can I assume you and Johnny won’t kill each other?”

Devi rolled her eyes. Johnny didn’t see it, but he knew it was there.

“We’ll be fine, thank you,” she said.

Tenna left, sending some kind of pointed look at Johnny. Maybe if he felt less crazy he’d have known what she thought she was accomplishing.

“So what did he do?”

“What?”

Devi put down whatever she’d been fussing with. “Edgar. What did he do?”

“Nothing,” Johnny said. This was the truth, wasn’t it?

“So, you’re here, claiming you need to see us even though you’ve spent months at a time with him, happily ignoring us, and nothing has gone wrong?”

“I didn’t say that,” he answered, resting his chin on his knees, “I said Edgar didn’t do anything.”

Devi came to sit beside him. “Then what the hell happened?”

“She left to let you ask me about this.” Sudden realization.

“Yes, she did.”

“Is she always like that?”

“ _Considerate_? Lots of people are, Nny. Answer the question.”

Considerate? That wasn’t what he’d meant.

“His song. It overpowers everything,” Johnny said, staring off beyond Devi’s table.

“That’s it?” Devi asked.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Come on, Nny, really? God, I hear Tenna’s all the time and you don’t see me going loopy.”

Johnny gave her a look.

“Loopy directly related to that,” Devi corrected.

“But, but you’re not-” Johnny started.

“Not an amazing music processing machine like you? No, I’m just not as special as you.”

“I didn’t-”

“Shut up, yes you did.”

Maybe he did mean it that way.

“You did this to yourself, you know,” Devi said.

“I didn’t ask him to try to drive me insane with his song,” Johnny countered.

“No, but you can’t possibly have thought it wouldn’t happen. You always told me you could feel when Jimmy was angry, or when he was jealous, and that you could feel things just as well from Edgar. What made you think that indulging some guy who says he loves you would not result in his song flaring up like that?”

_“have you not seen_  
 _and have you not heard_  
 _and do you not know about this-”_

Johnny shook his head.

“Do you remember when it happened to Jimmy?” Devi continued. “When you teased him just enough that we had to lock him in his trailer for a week so the song would stop screaming at us?”

“Yes. Yes, I remember.”

“And this still didn’t dawn on you?”

“No,” Johnny answered slowly, “Jimmy had an obsession or some kind of lust. Edgar doesn’t feel the same way Jimmy did. This is different.”

“You’re rationalizing. It’s not working.”

“No, really!” Johnny protested, finally looking at Devi. “It  _is_  different, I know it. It feels different. It even looks different. Edgar looks at me differently than Jimmy does. Did. Does.”

Devi leaned back and stared at the coffee stain on the ceiling. That stain and how it had gotten had been the subject of many long debates over the years.

“So what made you think,” Devi asked, with a sad kind of sympathy in her voice, “that good genuine feelings would be easier to deal with? That a song wouldn’t react more strongly to something that really consumed a person and not just high school infatuation?”

Johnny tightened his hold on his legs, pulling them closer to his chest. Maybe he could just close his eyes and compress his chest and…

_“are you like them?_  
 _can you surmise?_  
 _… in this world_  
 _to tell lies”_

“I didn’t think Edgar was that strong.”

Devi was quiet for several minutes before she spoke again.

“Nny, he can probably hear yo-”

“No, he can’t,” Johnny interrupted. He pressed his palms to his eyes. The colors made him a little dizzy, but he didn’t move his hands. “I thought, before, when he couldn’t hear his… Half of me was proud of him when he finally heard it. That part of me hummed. Part of me was angry, and that part let him sit there hunched over his own vomit.”

“That doesn’t mean he can’t hear yours.”

“He can’t. He would have told me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. More sure of that than anything else at this point. He would tell me if he heard it.”

Devi took out part of her hair and started retying it.

“What are you going to do if he ever does?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Johnny shook his head, still with his hands over his eyes. “It excites me and terrifies me at the same time.”

“I thought it would have been me,” Devi said quietly. She looked at her TV, which wasn’t on.

_“behind your face_  
 _behind your skin_  
 _behind you bones_  
 _look within”_

 

“I thought so, too.”

Tenna came back in the few minutes of quiet after that. She was ‘considerate’ enough not to say a word. She didn’t buy any eggs.

_“Lii~iies…”_

*****

  
When she’d finally sent Johnny home, Devi tried to talk to Tenna about what had been going on. Tenna didn’t want to hear about it.  She asked if Johnny was alright, and Devi responded half-truthfully.  Tenna said then that she just wanted to be informed when poor Edgar finally failed at everything.

Devi had been surprised. Tenna was usually so optimistic.

*****

Home again, and hoping desperately that he wasn’t crazy.

Johnny had been greeted enthusiastically and nearly smothered when he came back from Devi’s place. Edgar talked too fast about being worried, about not knowing, about scaring Johnny away. Johnny dismissed it all, not because those things weren’t true, just because the voice was too much.

“I’m fine, don’t worry,” he said.  Edgar looked skeptical, but accepted Johnny’s dismissal with no question.  It took a few moments for that to worry Johnny. And longer to act on it.

“Don’t let me do that,” Johnny said nearly twenty minutes after he’d come through the door. Edgar, thankfully, predictably, was confused.

“Huh? Do what?”

“Or maybe, it’s more like, ‘Don’t do that.’ I’m not sure.” Johnny squinted at something across the room trying to figure out the best version of whatever he’d said a moment ago.

“Nny, you’re starting to scare me.”

No, no, that was the opposite of help. Johnny looked up and really concentrated on Edgar’s face.

“Don’t do that,” he said, trying to make every syllable clear. “Don’t just let me brush things off like that.”

“I didn’t want to pry; I figured it was pretty reasonable to want to run when you’ve got me and everything here.”

Reasonable.

“You promise me. You promise that you’re not making excuses for me,” Johnny said, staring intently at Edgar.

“I’m not, really. I just thought it was something you’d tell me later,” Edgar explained. Johnny heard worry in there somewhere. “You know, like you usually do.”

“I hear your song in everything, Edgar. I can’t get it to go away.”

Edgar shifted his weight on the couch. Johnny didn’t remember sitting in the pink chair.

“I’m… sorry?” Edgar tried. “It doesn’t feel any different to me. I think sometimes that it’s faster than it used to be, but it’s not doing anything strange. Can I do something to fix it?”

Stop caring. Stop being so happy that Johnny was sitting there. Stop feeling elated at being able to come so close.

“I don’t think so. It’s not something you can control,” Johnny said, letting his gaze fall to Edgar’s knee or maybe just to the left of it. “It’s the people around you who are supposed to be able to deal with them, no matter how strong.”

“But you’re so good at that. You said we’re all just background noise. I thought… well, I don’t know that anything I thought would have been accurate,” Edgar tried to laugh, but it wasn’t terribly effective.

_“If happiness if all we have_  
 _Then how I am here today?_  
 _I exist without a world_  
 _Track all my time without a day.”_

 

“I thought so, too,” Johnny said. “I’d just miscalculated – underestimated – how much like Jimmy you’d be.”  If the song would just die down, he’d be able to think. He’d be able to do more than pronounce his words so deliberately. Like he was lying. He wasn’t lying.

“Like  _Jimmy_?” Edgar asked, with some poorly disguised horror, “What does he have to do with this?”

“Once, I told him I would go home with him. I teased him about it, and taunted him about it and was probably more horrible to him than he really deserves,” Johnny answered. He looked up to make sure Edgar had acknowledged – he did – and kept going. “His song started to get really loud after a day or so. Not just to me, but to Devi and Tenna, too. We had to lock him the trailer and scream at him for days to get it to die down.”

“I am hoping for more clarification, and I hope I am drawing the wrong parallels here.”

“The stronger the feeling,” Johnny explained slowly, “The louder the song. Yours is so much louder now than his ever was.”

Edgar looked a little embarrassed, and Johnny found the capacity to smile for once in what felt like days.

“I’ve never had one directed right at me with so much force before.”

“I’m sorry,” Edgar said, lowering his head. “I can’t- I don’t know what I can do about it.”

“I already told you it’s not you.”

There was another one of their trademark silences. At least, Johnny imagined it was silence for Edgar. Johnny heard verse after verse of Edgar’s song.

“Nny?”

“Yes.”

Edgar had missed a beat there. Maybe expecting that to have been a question.

“What does it mean that I can’t hear your song?”

“That you’re like everyone else.”

“No one else can-?”

“No. No one.” Forehead to his knees.

“So, you’re the only one who’s ever heard-?”

“You’re not listening to me.  _No one can hear it._ ”

“Not even you?” Edgar spoke near a whisper.

Johnny stared angrily at the floor.

“Not even me.”

Edgar looked like he wanted to cry, and his song nearly exploded. Johnny curled up in the chair, and tried desperately to pass out.

It worked.

*****

Edgar struggled with calling Devi, and waking Johnny up. Mostly with waking him up. Maybe Johnny felt better sleeping and not hearing Edgar’s song over everything.

Edgar listened to Johnny breathing and tried to hear a song in it. He sat on the arm of the pink recliner, unsure what lines he could cross. Little “may I?”s were not going to help now if Johnny couldn’t answer him.  How much of what he did before Johnny woke up would be respectful of Johnny’s personal space and how much would be actually giving a damn?

The decision didn’t take long. Personal space be damned, Edgar picked Johnny up out of the recliner and stretched him out on the couch.  Perhaps out of habit, he asked permission, but didn’t plan on stopping, permission or no. He wanted to hold him or clear his mind for him or do something – some little gesture that would be of help somehow – but there was really nothing he was capable of. The best he could do was lamely drape a blanket over Johnny, tuck his headphones onto his head and sit by the couch to wait for him to wake up. He made tea at some point, and Johnny slept through the whistle and Edgar dropping several mugs on the kitchen floor.

Edgar kept checking to make sure he was breathing. The song never manifested itself in Johnny’s breaths, but each time Edgar listened for it he was sure that if he just got closer the next time, it would be there. Somehow, this degraded into listening to Johnny’s heartbeat. It was still beating, but Edgar found that he was disappointed that it didn’t beat to some off balance rhythm that he could discern a song from.

The headphones probably didn’t help.

*****

There was something on his lungs. Something trying to compress him. Something warm. He was wearing headphones.

_“_ _Wheeling_ _choking_  
 _drifting hopelessly_  
 _in a waiting dream_  
 _Trying to get on track again_  
 _shedding parts of you_

_Bottoms up now_  
 _shut the door on me_  
 _there is no ending_  
 _drip drain leak seep_  
 _here's more of it_  
 _I want to be you”_

When Johnny opened his eyes again, he saw the ceiling, and part of the couch. He didn’t remember falling asleep on the couch.  His head hurt, but there was nothing trying to drown out all of his thoughts anymore. The music was all a low fuzz again, even Edgar’s, though it was still louder and more prominent than the others, felt fine and manageable again. The headphones helped.

_“Tether me to the next moment_  
 _don’t you see?_  
 _in between_

_I can't breathe_  
 _drown myself in you_  
 _Don’t you see?_  
 _It's not me”_

Speaking of Edgar.

“Um,” Johnny managed. He felt the hum of the syllable under Edgar’s head, which had been lying on his chest for what Johnny guessed was a little while.

Edgar jumped and shuffled into a non-threatening position on the floor, perhaps thinking if he got there fast enough Johnny wouldn’t notice what he’d just been doing.

“Sorry,” he said, “I was just making sure you were still alive.”

Johnny felt groggy, but managed to smile.

_“Begging silence,_  
 _stillness listening_  
 _Memories floating_  
 _fragments surface_  
 _Don’t recognize_  
 _Could this be_  
 _half me?”_

“A likely story,” he joked. “You were planning to have your way with me, I know it.”

“I like them unconscious,” Edgar shot back, grinning.  Johnny laughed. Hadn’t done that in some time. Felt like something escaping.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Edgar said, the earlier joke gone from his voice. “You scared me.”

“Sorry,” Johnny answered. “I didn’t really try to… maybe I did. Still, sorry. Thanks for the,” he tugged at the blanket, “the help, I guess.”

“Of course. I’m glad it didn’t get me killed.”

“Killed? Was I thrashing or something?”

“No, I just thought maybe you’d be angry that I’d moved you.  Permissions and personal space an’ all.”

It hadn’t even totally occurred to Johnny that he would have had to have been carried to the couch, and actually placed there. He looked at Edgar intently for a moment, trying to find something in his face – he knew what it was but didn’t have a name for it.

“It’s okay,” Johnny said, concentrating on Edgar’s face. “Don’t worry about it.”

Edgar nodded. “Sure. Um, is something wrong?”

_“I know you've been on_  
 _my back again_  
 _Gotta wait for me_  
 _Feel your breath_  
 _on my neck again_  
 _gotta find my way_

_Tether me to the next moment_  
 _can't you see_  
 _in between_  
 _I can't breathe_  
 _forgot myself in you”_

Johnny shook his head. It was in there, he was pretty sure, but he’d wait. Laid his head back down on the cushion, and watched the ceiling.

“No, it’s fine. Head just hurts a little. I’ll resume normal functions in a few minutes, captain.”

Edgar shifted to his knees. He was easier to look at now. He picked a hand up and went to move some stray pieces of Johnny’s hair. He stopped before he got too close, and gave Johnny half a smile that looked almost embarrassed.

_“normal and happy…”_

“May I?” he asked.

Johnny nodded.  “Yes.”

It had surprised Johnny when Edgar asked for permission, and he felt strange giving it. Like he really shouldn’t have had to.  Like it had interrupted something. Out of place. He closed his eyes and felt fingertips and stray hairs brush over his forehead.

“Do you still hear the song?” Edgar asked, his hand resting near Johnny’s ear. The song in Johnny’s headphones fell apart.

“Yes,” Johnny answered, eyes still closed, “but it’s not the way it was.”

“Something different?”

“It’s not so loud. I think it would fade out if I wanted it to.” Johnny felt Edgar smile.

“’If you wanted it to?’”

“Yeah,” Johnny opened his eyes. “I think I’ll keep it around when it’s not trying to kill me.”

“You’d think you’d be sick of it by now.”

“Do  _you_  get sick of it?”

“Well, no, but it’s, well, it’s mine. So, that’d be like getting sick of me, of myself, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, it would. I’m not sick of you yet though, so it’s staying.”

“How nice to know you care,” Edgar said, rolling his eyes. Johnny appreciated these kinds of jokes more than any others; they really helped manage any potential awkward.

“I’m a nice guy,” Johnny said, shrugging as much as he was able while sprawled on the couch, “It’s a curse.” Edgar laughed, and a finger or two brushed Johnny’s ear. Johnny suspected that was meant to look like an accident.

“Johnny, I feel pretty sure that you’re really not a nice person at all,” Edgar said softly.

“This calls your tastes into question.”

“I know,” Edgar answered. Deliberately ran his fingernails across Johnny’s temple. “I just don’t care.”  The song buzzed in Johnny’s head and he flinched. Edgar snapped away from Johnny’s side and held his hands up.

_“…happy_  
 _I have nothing to fear”_

“Don’t,” Johnny said. “I’m not going to bite you, and you’re not doing anything wrong.” 

Edgar bit his lip and looked uncomfortable. Johnny’s head stopped swimming enough that he felt like he could sit up. Edgar twitched a little when Johnny moved, like maybe he’d wanted to help Johnny do it, but didn’t make any moves to do so.

“You’re pretty jumpy about all this, Edgar.”

“I don’t want to impose. No, that’s not the word. Don’t want to upset you? Make you uncomfortable? That’s better.” A small, nervous laugh. “Something like that.”

“I’m not,” Johnny said.

“Not…?”

“Not uncomfortable. Not upset.”

Edgar sighed. “You’re hard to read, Nny.”

“Ever think maybe you just suck at reading?”

“Then the combined power of your personality and my failure at people is pretty damning,” Edgar said, with a hint of a less nervous smile. “I couldn’t have fallen for someone more difficult to figure out if I’d tried.”

“You think so?” Johnny asked, leaning against his knees. “I’d have thought Devi would have been hard for you.”

“Are you kidding? Devi would already have kicked me in the face and slapped me around when I did something dumb, and then told me flat out, ‘Yeah, you can do that’ when I sucked a little less.”

Johnny smirked. “You want me to slap you around?”

“Not so much.”

“So, ‘yes’ is too ambiguous for you, then?”

“No, it’s not that,” Edgar said, glancing off to one side. Thinking, Johnny guessed. He couldn’t remember which side glance typically meant people were lying.

“I don’t have any plans for ‘take me now,’ if that’s what you’re after,” Johnny said.

“Well, damn, there go all my hopes and dreams.” Edgar rolled his eyes.  Johnny grinned at him. There really was a reason that Edgar was his best friend. It started to make sense that Edgar had fallen for him using that same reason. Maybe Devi had been right. Several times.

“Do you mind if get off the floor?” Edgar asked.

“Oh, sure.” Johnny pulled his feet off of the middle cushion and Edgar climbed up to sit beside him. He got fairly close, and Johnny smiled at him.  Edgar took one of Johnny’s hands in his, and rubbed his thumb over the back of it. Johnny watched Edgar’s fingers with a sort of detachment. Like it wasn’t his hand, and those weren’t his best friend’s fingers – he just liked the movement.

“I’m not hoping for anything dramatic,” Edgar said, focusing on Johnny’s hand. “I just want…,” he trailed off, then laughed lightly. “I don’t really know what I want. This just makes me happy.  _You_  make me happy.”

“I know.”  Johnny wished he could say something like ‘You too,’ or even ‘Thanks’ but one was a lie and the other seemed vastly inappropriate for such an honest sentiment.  It wasn’t like Edgar didn’t make him happy on some level - it just wasn’t the level Edgar would have wanted.

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

“You being happy about me existing? Not really.”

“That’s not really what I meant.”

“I know. But that doesn’t bother me either.”

Edgar pressed his thumb into the skin on the back of Johnny’s hand. It left a light mark when he let go.

“How do you want this to end, Nny?”

“Hell if I know,” Johnny answered. “The best way, I guess.”

“Something tells me that’s going to be hard to obtain.”

“You keep acting like our thoughts are in direct opposition. It’s not as bad as you think.”  Sometimes, he just said things and really wasn’t sure where they came from. He liked to blame it on older versions of himself, even if he knew they’d never been sane enough people to have conversations or situations that were anything like his.

“You told me you wouldn’t fuck with my head. Promised you wouldn’t give me false hope.”

“I’m not. It’s really not as bad as you think it is.” Johnny studied Edgar’s hold on his hand for a minute. “Really,” Johnny continued, still watching Edgar’s thumb, “I’d be even more okay with this if you weren’t so nervous all the time.”  He thought that was true. He wasn’t completely sure.

“I can’t help it,” Edgar said. “You must be the most terrifying person to fall for in the history of three lifetimes.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“I’m pretty sure it is.”

“I don’t remember making conscious efforts to intimidate the fuck out of you, so I have to say I’m curious to hear the explanation here.”

“I don’t want to seem like Jimmy. I don’t want to come on too strong, or offend you or anything. I just want you to feel even half of what I do or something, and then…and then something.”

There had been some sort of explanation in there, but Johnny forgot about it the moment it was said.

“Half of how much?” Johnny asked, and for once, Edgar was on the same track.

“More than I can convey. I’d like to be able to, but, I’m not terribly good at it.”

“I can’t aspire to half of something you can’t even measure,” Johnny said, trying to joke. “Really. How bad is it?”

“How  _bad_?”

“How much do you love me?”

Edgar started talking, but didn’t say much. His speech was filled with false starts and struggles to find the right phrase. His grip on Johnny’s hand tightened. Johnny hadn’t remembered Edgar sitting this close before. Shoulder to shoulder. Had Edgar gotten gutsy in the last few minutes, or had he been sitting there from the start? Edgar hummed a little to himself when words failed him, and Johnny thought maybe he was giving up on the question all together. When Johnny went to ask again, Edgar smiled, apparently to himself, sported a ‘well, fuck it’ expression for a moment, and did something reminiscent of singing. Not terribly well, but that wasn’t important.

_“More than I could ever tell you_  
 _More than you could know_  
 _More than I could ever measure_  
 _Would all be impossible to show_

_Immortal until I find happy_  
 _I have nothing to fear.”_

Edgar’s song. Sort of.

“You changed the words,” Johnny said quietly as though any sudden volume would cause the walls to cave in.

“They just… came out that way.”  
                              
“So… were you answering me, or singing?”

“Yes.”

“That’s…” Johnny didn’t finish. He leaned into Edgar’s shoulder without much thought, and let his head rest there without much more. This was a little distressing. Edgar’s feelings didn’t bother him, and he felt confident that whatever his own feelings ended up being, those wouldn’t bother him either, but he hadn’t expected Edgar’s to be that bad. That important to him, that much.

“Should I be apologizing now?”

“No,” Johnny answered, “but I wonder if maybe I should.”

“Don’t,” Edgar said. “I think I’d rather just pretend.”

*****

Edgar didn’t know what happened, and he really had no way to be sure. He’d stopped trying to figure out anything related to the music inside people after a while, so why he’d felt compelled to chant some lyrics that weren’t even the correct ones for his song eluded him. He knew why he’d chosen to voice them, at least, but he didn’t know how they got that way. He really wasn’t the type to try his hand at lyrics; they’d always let Devi do that. In retrospect, that was probably pretty evident. He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but he was sure it had to have been a lyrical nightmare.

It had even rhymed. Sweet hells.

However, in another ‘mystery of music’ moment, Johnny hadn’t run from him, or laughed at him, or even joked. He’d actually put his head on Edgar’s shoulder. He’d crossed some line, because after that, Johnny showed no discontent at all being held close, or even half-lying on Edgar. There were still lines there, but Edgar was happy to tread them carefully with his usual permissions.

“May I?” To touch his face.

“Yes.”

“May I?” To put his arms around him.

“Yes.”

Edgar didn’t think he remembered a time when Johnny had ever said ‘no’. This didn’t bother him nearly as much as it should have. When it did bother him, he was usually out with the rest of the group, and looking at Jimmy.

Edgar was sure that Jimmy could smell Johnny on him, and was just getting ready to strike. It was then that Edgar would try to think, “I can ask him for anything, and he’ll give it to me,” aggressively at Jimmy and hope that it would make the moment pass.

In the end, thinking that way just made him feel guilty. How much was Johnny letting him get away with?

Weeks later, with Johnny still perfectly comfortable lying on Edgar’s shoulder and watching television, Edgar thought maybe he should ask.

“My god, this theme song is awesome.”

“Uh, wha?” Edgar blinked, startled back into the present.

“This THEME SONG.  Don’t you hear this? This makes me want to commit horrible unspeakable acts and the show is about the LAW, thisisAWESOME.”

“This show looks ancient, Nny.”

“Of course it is, it’s on at three AM. They don’t air the good stuff during the day.”

“Weren’t you watching another one of these the other day?”

“Yeah, there’s something like five different versions. This one is really boring, since there’s no horrible gore in the opening half, but the theme song – oh man, the theme song.”

“I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, this is either kind of cute or really fucked up.”

Johnny breathed into Edgar’s shirt. “The best things usually walk a fine line between those, I think.” Edgar’s skin tingled.

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said.

“Okay,” Johnny answered. “Wow, that lady is so going to die.”

“Why have you never said ‘no’?”

The aforementioned lady died that very moment.

“Told you,” Johnny said. “What now?”

“Why haven’t you ever said ‘no’?”

“You didn’t give me a reason to.”

“So, you were really okay with everything?”

“Mm-hmm,” Johnny nodded against Edgar’s shirt.

Okay then.

Edgar moved his arm from the cushions on the couch and let it rest on Johnny’s back.

“Is that okay?”

Johnny made some sarcastic remark.

“May I?” Edgar corrected, smiling.

“Yes,” came the answer. “Might as well stay consistent, Edgar.”

*****

Jimmy had come over to complain one time too many, and she’d let it slip. Tenna had practically written up a contract saying that it had been all Devi’s doing that let Jimmy know that Johnny wasn’t treating the ‘dating Edgar game’ as a game anymore. She didn’t really know how it happened, it just came out.

“It doesn’t matter, Jimmy, jeez! Johnny’s been taking this kinda seriously for at least a month!”

And that had been it. Tenna had clamped her hands over her mouth, and Devi had actually wanted to turn into some kind of primordial goo and just slide through the floorboards.

Jimmy stormed out of the building, and Devi bit her lip.  There was no way she’d have time to beat him to Edgar’s house. When she looked at Tenna for backup, Tenna held up a sign with ‘not my fault’ scrawled across it in green crayon.

Fuck.

*****

He noticed that Johnny’s responses had changed. He didn’t shudder under Edgar’s fingertips anymore, or shrink away from Edgar’s arm around him. Edgar was sure that he felt Johnny leaning into him, leaning into touch. He couldn’t be sure, and maybe it was all in his head, but he thought, surely, he’d seen it there. Maybe it wasn’t leaning at all; maybe it was just the absence of shying away.

Edgar evaluated every move Johnny made from the moment he suspected onward. Was that a shift towards him, or just that Johnny’s leg had fallen asleep? Did he really need to get up to go upstairs or was he trying to get away from Edgar?    
   
Edgar didn’t like that he let out long breaths when Johnny left the room, as though when he was with him he was straining or working too hard. Like he was relieved. It was the opposite, entirely. Nothing made him feel more at ease than seeing Johnny, but the anxiety associated with worrying about how he was doing ‘courting’-wise drove him mad.

When Johnny returned, Edgar didn’t make any sudden movements. Johnny sat back down next to him, and did nothing that looked even remotely like bolting for the door when Edgar slid his arm back around him. For a moment, Edgar forgot that he was worried, or that he was analyzing, and took in the smell and texture of Johnny’s hair instead. Johnny had long ago begun permitting these soft nuzzles on the side of his head, so he neither flinched nor really moved at all when Edgar felt his hair. Edgar backed off before he was unwelcome and went back to watching whatever was on television.

Johnny shifted again, and Edgar moved his arms up and away from him in response.

“No, no,” Johnny said, when he felt Edgar’s arms move into the air. “It’s not you, you’re fine.”

“Oh, I thought you wanted to get up again or something.”

“Nope,” Johnny said, half-yawning, “just getting comfortable.”  As he spoke, he pushed against Edgar, repositioning his limbs as he got situated, and then dropped his head against Edgar’s collar bone. Edgar felt everything in him light up, and he was sure he’d be a pile of smoldering ashes in seconds had he actually been on the fire he felt.

When the burning died down, and Johnny was still where Edgar thought he’d imagined him to be, Edgar tried to speak. Nothing came out, so he coughed once. He startled Johnny, as evidenced by the way he jumped, but Johnny still didn’t move from his spot.

“Nny,” Edgar finally managed.

“Mm?”

“Nny, could I talk to you?”

“You already are,” Johnny replied, still not moving.

“No,” Edgar said, trying to sit up, “no, I mean really.”

Johnny sat up in response to Edgar’s struggle. “What?” he asked.

“You’ve been acting differently, lately.”

“Really?” Johnny asked. “Am I crazier now, or what?”

“No, no, nothing like that…” Edgar wasn’t sure how he wanted to phrase it. “You’ve been reacting differently to me. To being touched.”

Johnny looked skeptical.

“Maybe it’s just me,” Edgar continued, “but I wondered if anything had changed. If it ‘worked’ or something.”

“I don’t think I can give you an announcement when some kind of moment dawns on me, Edgar.”

“From what I see,” Edgar said, “said moment dawned a little while ago.”

Johnny shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t really know.”

Edgar shifted in his seat again. Johnny was still sitting practically in his lap, waiting for Edgar to shut up so he could go back to falling asleep on him.

“I’m being serious, Nny. This is important.”

“Ugh, serious face.” Johnny rolled his eyes in fake annoyance, and then grinned. “Sorry. What is it?”

“I just want to know if I’m getting anywhere, I thought for sure you were reacting diff-”

“I can’t tell you ‘Hey! You’re two-thirds there, Edgar! Keep going!’ I don’t think it works that way.”

“Will you tell me?”

“When you ‘get there’?” Johnny asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah.”

“You know,” Johnny answered, sounding slightly annoyed and returning to his prior spot near Edgar’s shoulder, “I don’t think I will. I think I’ll let you figure it out.”

“God dammit, Nny, what the hell do you want from me?”

“Nothing at all,” Johnny breathed into Edgar’s neck. Edgar felt himself shiver.

“Nny, look at me.”

Johnny sat up again at the request, but only just enough to look at Edgar from a few inches away, and Edgar studied his eyes intensely. When Johnny started to look uncomfortable and looked away, Edgar held his jaw.  Johnny flinched.

“I don’t know what to do,” Edgar said. “This is getting to a point where I can’t do it on my own anymore. I need some kind of signal from you that I’m not fucking up.”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” Johnny asked, irritated, weakly trying to shake off Edgar’s grip on his jaw. Edgar continued staring at him.

“I haven’t run from you, and I let you do this stuff,” Johnny said. “What about that is not saying ‘You aren’t fucking up’ to you?”

“Because I don’t know how much is tolerating, and how much is-”

“Tolerating?” Johnny asked angrily, finally wrenching his face from Edgar’s hold. “Let’s have a demonstration, shall we?” He pulled on Edgar’s shirt and forced him to sit up fully. Edgar went to protest, and Johnny glared at him. Edgar said nothing.

Johnny picked up Edgar’s arm and draped it over himself, letting it hang limply over his shoulders. And then sat there. He looked at Edgar pointedly, and when Edgar made a questioning expression, Johnny responded curtly, “Tolerating.”

Edgar was about to nod, when Johnny nearly rammed himself into Edgar’s shoulder. He readjusted Edgar’s arm around him and pressed his head against Edgar’s chest. “Rather fucking okay with,” Johnny said. Edgar could feel the vibrations from his voice.

Johnny sat back up to where he’d been when Edgar requested that he look at him.  
   
“Do we understand now?”

“Yes, I think so…,” Edgar answered.

“Good,” Johnny answered, and went to put his head back down.

“Wait, wait,” Edgar said, stopping Johnny with his jaw again, though gentler this time. Johnny just looked at him.

“I’d like to…,” Edgar trailed off, but pulled Johnny a little closer. Johnny blinked, and kept his eyes closed a moment longer than was necessary. Edgar wondered how much thought Johnny had accomplished in the second he’d blocked everything out with that blink. Johnny’s eyes opened again a second later.

“May I?” Edgar breathed, tilting Johnny’s face only just. The same familiar permissions he’d been asking for the tiniest of things.

Johnny just barely nodded. “Yes…”

And this felt entirely foreign compared to kissing his best friend on television. Everything was different about this. Edgar had thought he’d felt euphoric when the Cherry Doom incident had transpired.

No.

When he actually felt things, when he knew he could lose himself in it, because Johnny had given him permission to - that was it. When he could keep his hand on Johnny’s jaw, or move those stray pieces of hair that Johnny kept cutting into his hair, and nothing changed, that was it. When he could swear he felt finger tips in his hair, and on his neck, that was it. When he was home, and no one was there to radiate hatred at him, and no one there to film him, and no one there to shake their head, or to gloat, or to fangirl, that was it.

And when he realized that one or both of them would need to take a moment to let this all sink in, that was it.

Johnny’s head dropped to Edgar’s shoulder immediately. For a moment, Edgar thought he’d suffocated him or that he’d blacked out.  He heard Johnny say something, but he didn’t understand it.

“Nny?”

“Shit.”

Edgar swallowed and bit his lip.

“Nny, I-”

“Have you always been doing that?”

“What?”

Johnny was silent for nearly half a minute. “Have you always been kissing me like that? Even…” His voice trailed off, or got caught in something.

“I think so.  You mean from before? What would I have changed?”

Johnny shook his head into Edgar’s shoulder. Drying eyes? Objecting whole-heartedly? Baffled? Turning Edgar into a snot rag? Edgar couldn’t tell.

“Even on TV?” Johnny asked, his voice muffled by the shirt he was talking into.

“I’m not sure what you’re-”

“I could  _feel_  that. I could feel things, things from you. Things that you feel. Before, I never felt… Not like that. Not that.” He lifted his head, but still didn’t look at Edgar.

“You didn’t know it was there, before,” Edgar said, quietly. Johnny was silent again. Edgar thought maybe he was crying or something, but he couldn’t hear anything.

Edgar felt Johnny shift his weight, and then pull back, and finally look at him. Edgar almost said ‘hi.’ Johnny’s expression was blank for a minute, and then he, in a move Edgar didn’t expect at all, smiled.

“That wasn’t part of the ‘tolerating’ category,” Johnny said, nearly nose to nose with Edgar.

“I gathered,” Edgar answered, partly smiling himself. Another silence. Maybe only ten seconds, but they’d have been the longest ten seconds of Edgar’s life if that was true.

“So?” Johnny asked, suddenly.

“So?”

“So.”

“Are we there yet?” A little sheepish.

“Oh, good for you,” Johnny said, settling back onto Edgar’s shoulder. “Funny, I didn’t feel any smart come through. Wonder if it’s a fluke.”

Edgar thought maybe making fun of him was Johnny’s defense mechanism.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edgar’s song is still Edgar’s song from prior chapters. This means I still wrote it. Take that for what it’s worth, I guess.  
> “Behind Your Skin” by Squonk Opera and  
> “Normal and Happy” composed by Phillip Kraft from the performance piece ‘teeth’ seen in Portland, Oregon in Fall of 2007.


	19. An End Has A Start

He stormed up the hill to Edgar's house, intent on something, though he had only a vague idea as to what. He knew there would be yelling involved, and perhaps some thrashing, but he wasn't sure, at this point, who would be on the receiving end.   
  
He hadn't even been given a chance. Johnny had never once humored him or given Jimmy the opportunity to show that they could be so close, so alike. Maybe he'd been a bit of an extreme fanboy in the earlier years, but everyone grows up. Johnny himself had changed and stopped acting like an entitled child at the slightest provocation. Jimmy hadn't seen Johnny's behavior in that way back then, but when he reflected on what he used to think was badass, he found a few things lacking.   
  
But Edgar had done the greater wrong. Johnny hadn't given Jimmy a chance, but Edgar was the one who slipped under the radar and infiltrated something sacred and special. Before Edgar had come along, Jimmy, Johnny, and Devi, with the occasional appearance from Tenna, were the core of the world. They were all that was, and they were the closest of friends. They all looked at Johnny as special, as something odd that they needed to keep close to them. He used to say that he remembered things, and even if Jimmy and Devi hadn't remembered, being visible to this intriguing person was enough to make them never leave his side. Edgar had come in and shattered it. Edgar had crawled his way into the room and then Johnny invited him in, spent the weekend with him.  
  
Because Edgar had sounded crazier than Johnny did.   
  
"I remember you," he'd said. Jimmy and Devi had known not to mess with Johnny's game, but Edgar had come in pretending he was the originator.   
  
Something in Jimmy had felt betrayed when it all turned out to be true. He tried to remember things feverishly after that day, and thanks to Johnny's memories and countless Homicides shows, he knew how he was supposed to have died, but remembered nothing that he could place as not part of his current lifetime but a flash of light and a suitcase. Edgar seemed to remember more and more everyday.   
  
He reached the corner of Edgar's block, and centered in on the house. Only two in from the corner. He stood at the door, his shoulders shaking and his breathing difficult. Instead of bursting through the door (he'd learned through some eavesdropping that Edgar never kept the door locked), he slid over to a window, and tried to look into the house without drawing too much attention to himself. The glare was a little too much to see clearly, so he tried to shield his eyes until the living room came into focus.   
  
And a wave came over him that combined rage and vomit. He neither broke the glass, nor threw the contents of his stomach onto it, but he came close to both.   
  
Just lying there, on the couch, Johnny sprawled nearly entirely on top of Edgar, who was propped up by the arm of the couch. Johnny actually making regular eye contact. Talking to him. Edgar brought his arms around Johnny's waist and Jimmy nearly jumped through the window. When Johnny didn't slip away from him, or even give him an odd look, but SMILED instead, Jimmy had had enough. In the second it took to ball his fist and pull it back in preparation to slam into the window, he saw a kiss.

Jimmy made some kind of noise, but it wasn't loud enough to be heard from the inside. Even Jimmy could tell that what he was seeing in this window was different from what he'd put up with looking at during shows and interviews. Had this been what went on while he let Johnny stay here on the weekends?  
  
The next thing he knew, he was tearing through Edgar's door, and knocking things off of his walls in the process.  
  
Johnny and Edgar jumped, and nearly fell onto the floor. Edgar looked suitably alarmed, but Johnny just looked furious. Jimmy's instinct was to puree Edgar into nothing and saturate the floors with him. He ended up with Johnny in his face instead.   
  
"What the fuck are you doing?!" they screamed at each other.   
  
"What am  _I_  doing?" Jimmy shrieked. "What are  _you_  doing?! You fucking lied to us! This was supposed to be a publicity thing, a game! And I find you here moments from fucking him into the couch?"  
  
"I'm not! And if you'd make less of a habit of stalking me and breaking into people's houses-"  
  
"It's a good fucking thing I did!"  
  
"‘Good thing?’ What difference does this make to you, Jimmy?!" Johnny yelled. "The probability that I'd come home with you is no smaller than it was five fucking years ago! It's still ZERO."  
  
"Because you didn't give me a chance," Jimmy countered, motioning towards Edgar. "You just tell us you're going to fake it with this guy who just stole you from us and you're not even faking anymore! Devi told me you've been taking this seriously for weeks! That you've been letting him slobber all over you away from the cameras, too! Were you just not going to tell me, hmm?"  
  
"No, I wasn't," Johnny answered. "And you know what? No one was. We agreed that you didn't need to know until something was decided."  
  
"I'm part of this, too! Why the fuck did you exclude me?"  
  
"Because you'd do this."  
  
"I'm worth just as much as he is," Jimmy said bitterly. He felt his shoulders shaking again from the rush of the confrontation.  
  
"Congratulations," Johnny spat.   
  
"You've treated me like this from the very start, Nny! Yet  _he_  comes along and goes puppy-eyed at you and you make out with him on his couch?!" Jimmy wanted to throw up even saying most of that sentence.  
  
"If I've treated you like this from day one, Jimmy," Johnny said quietly, "then that doesn't make you terribly bright, does it?"  
  
"Fuck you!"  
  
"No."  
  
Jimmy seethed. He looked at Edgar who was standing off to the side and seemed to be stunned by the whole exchange. He'd clearly expected to the one arguing and probably being torn up.   
  
"This is bullshit," Jimmy growled, staring at Edgar. "You're just gonna watch, are you? Just stare while Johnny makes everything better and chases bad ol' Jimmy out of the house? Going to hide behind him, are you?" He sidestepped away from Johnny and towards Edgar. Edgar stood up straighter and opened his mouth to say something just as Jimmy was tugged back toward Johnny by the collar of his shirt.  
  
"Your issue," Johnny sneered, "is with me."  
  
"It's okay," Edgar said. "I think maybe this has been building for a while. Let him go, Nny."  
  
Johnny's fingers untangled from Jimmy's shirt, and he stepped back, but kept a venomous glare locked onto Jimmy as he moved.  
  
"I've never been entirely clear on what you wanted in all this, Jimmy." Edgar sounded remarkably calm, considering the circumstances. "But you've probably got a few reasons to obliterate my face by now. I'd appreciate it if you didn't injure my hands, since we still have to play, our feelings on things aside."  
  
Jimmy was a bit taken aback. He hadn't expected calm and rational. He'd been looking forward to cowering in fear and pleading, and he wasn't sure how to deal with people who weren't. This was sort of disappointing.  
  
"You stole him from us," Jimmy finally managed. He clenched and unclenched his fist as he spoke, trying to give himself something rhythmic to focus on.  
  
"That wasn't what I came there for."  
  
"But that's what you did. You destroyed everything," Jimmy said, realizing for the first time how long ago it had been - that he was clinging to something he’d loved desperately when he was fifteen, and that it still bothered him just as intensely years later that he’d lost it. Had it taken from him. "We had everything, we were fine, and Johnny was what kept us that way. We lived around him, and you waltzed in like it was nothing and took the center out from under all of us."  
  
"It wasn't 'nothing' for me," Edgar replied. His voice shook like he was getting ready to let this escalate into something Jimmy was more skilled at dealing with. "It was one of the most frightening things I'd ever done. I remembered him and wanted to find him, and thought he might have the answers I was looking for. I never intended to take him from anyone. I wanted to be close to him just like you guys did."  
  
"But we were there first!" It came out automatically. Even Jimmy realized how childish it sounded.  
  
"And Devi was there before you were," Johnny snapped. He was sitting on the arm of the couch now, still glaring angrily.  
  
"For what?" Jimmy asked angrily. "A whole month, maybe?"   
  
"What difference does it make if it's a month or a year?"  
  
"Are you kidding me?!" Jimmy burst out. "We WERE something. We were close, we were a tribe! We were all that there was! And you let this whimpering loser into everything! And now you're-!" He couldn't even finish.  
  
"Can we just get on with this?" Edgar asked. "I'd rather you try to tear me up as soon as possible so I have hope of speaking coherently next time we have to appear somewhere in front of people."  
  
"No!" Jimmy yelled. This wasn't about tearing Edgar apart anymore. This was about justice. This was the principle of the thing, this was pride. "This won't end if I just smear you into the carpet, Edgar. I'll leave and it'll still be you here with just him."  
  
"I'm not planning on going anywhere," Edgar replied, "and I doubt Nny's going anywhere, either."

“Then I want it to change,” Jimmy said, trying to maintain control of his voice. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you can’t keep him away from the rest of us like this.”

“I don’t,” Edgar explained. “I can count the times I actually asked him to stay here with me on one hand. He comes here because he wants to.”

“I like how we’re fighting over the guy who’s sitting right here,” Johnny muttered from the couch.

“I’m not asking you to stop whatever…,” Jimmy trailed off and made a face while he motioned towards the couch, “whatever this is. I’m telling you that you can’t fucking keep him to yourself.”

“So you’re all going to share me, is that it?” Johnny asked, irritated.

“Yes.” Jimmy nodded. “Like we used to.”

“And this wouldn’t be an issue if you’d just kept to your own damned business.”

“It’s not just because of that, Nny! I thought this was bullshit well before all this crap. Devi kept trying to tell you and you ignored her.” Jimmy flailed his arms for emphasis. “DEVI, Nny. You ignored Devi. I’m  _used_  to being ignored. When you ignore Devi, something is wrong.”

Johnny was quiet, and Edgar had returned to looking a little nervous.

“Do you  _see_  now?” Jimmy whined. “It’s not just  _this_   _particular_  shit, it’s all of it.”

“And she didn’t come to see me herself? She sent  _you_?”

“She didn’t betray your little secret on purpose. I made her angry. I’m guessing by the face she gave Tenna she didn’t mean it. She didn’t send me, I came on my own.”

“Of course you did,” Johnny muttered.  He rocked back and fell into the cushions, letting his legs fall over the arm of the couch. “So are you here to give Edgar a kick in the head, or some kind of fucked up blessing?”

“I-” Jimmy stopped. He didn’t know anymore.  Somehow, in the middle of this conversation, the outrage had stopped being about Edgar violating something sacred and holy and had been more about ‘don’t leave me.’  “I’m here because I’m like him.” He nodded towards Edgar.

Edgar looked uncomfortable, and leaned to take a step backwards.

“Because I’m just like him,” Jimmy said again, “and you’re all I’ve got.”

“What are you-?”

“Really, Nny. Think about it. It was you, and me, and Devi and Tenna. I was happy with it, I fit there. Do you know what it is now?” Jimmy waited for a few moments of silence. “It’s Devi and Tenna, and Johnny and Edgar, and then me.” For a moment, he almost added, ‘ _There,_ that’ll _make you feel bad.’_

“The stream of fangirls isn’t enough for you, then?” Johnny asked from the cushions.

“That’s not the same.”

“Seems you need a stream of fan _boys_ , then.”

“Nny, come on!” Edgar’s voice. Johnny looked just as surprised as Jimmy felt. Johnny sat up and looked at Edgar. Actual eye contact. Jimmy clenched a fist again.

“Jimmy’s not presenting anything unreasonable,” Edgar continued. “You don’t need to spit venom at him. He’s got a point. I’ve felt a little guilty sometimes about you being here all the time, and you really are the one that ties this whole thing together.”

An expression crossed Johnny’s face that Jimmy had rarely seen, so he had a hard time placing what it was.  Johnny crossed his arms over his chest and pulled his knees close. He looked odd for a moment – uneasy? - and then looked up at Jimmy.

“Get out,” he said. In a rare moment, it was Johnny that Jimmy wanted to tear apart. When he felt he was about to, Johnny kept talking.

“Get out. We’ll see you at Devi’s in an hour.”

Jimmy looked at Edgar, whose face echoed Jimmy’s confusion. Edgar shrugged a sort of apology and went to get the door.

“I don’t know, either,” Edgar told Jimmy as he stood on the porch. “But apparently, we’ll see you in a little while.”

“Riiight.”

“Thanks for sparing my hands,” Edgar said, smiling and wiggling some fingers.

“If I’d’a hit you, I don’t know how I’d play either. You got lucky, you bastard.” Jimmy found himself grinning, despite the weird of the situation.

With nothing else to do but stand creepily on the porch, Jimmy went back to Devi’s.

*****

Edgar leaned back against the door when he closed it after Jimmy. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to go back into the other room. Had all this just happened a little while ago? Had he really been blissfully uncaring about anything but the feeling of being so close to Johnny less than an hour ago?

“You did that really well,” came Johnny’s voice from the other room.

Edgar leaned forward, but stayed against the door.

“Did what well?” he asked.

“Handled Jimmy.”

“I guess so.”

“You really were scared he was going to tear you apart,” Johnny said, “but you told him he could. The calm act was a bluff. I think I’m impressed.”

Edgar let himself drift back into the room. Johnny hadn’t moved from the corner of the couch cushion.

“He had no reason to listen to me screaming at him, like he does you, so I figured I needed something else.” Edgar shrugged.

Johnny looked at Edgar instead of the fireplace.

“I don’t think I want to be an anchor for them all, Edgar.”

“It looks to me like you used to.”

Johnny sighed. “Something like that.”

Edgar found he felt more awkward just standing there in front of the couch, so he sat back down. He was beginning to think that he was developing real love/hate issues with the couch. Johnny reached over and grabbed a fist full of the bottom of Edgar’s shirt.

“Don’t worry,” he said, staring into the floor, “this doesn’t change anything.”

Edgar felt immediately compelled to hang onto Johnny and just not let go of him for the next hour. When he hesitated, and took a breath to speak, Johnny slid closer to him and rested his head on Edgar’s collar bone.

“Don’t ask me,” Johnny said into the fabric of Edgar’s shirt. “You already know what the answer is.”

And Edgar held onto him until they were sure they’d be late to see Devi.

*****

  
“I like how he arranges for things to happen over here without even asking about it first.”

“I… couldn’t really say no.”

“You never could. Not to him.”

Devi tossed some hair over her shoulder and surveyed the room. It didn’t look totally horrible, but it wasn’t the heavenly clean of Edgar’s place. It was always darker than his place, even without the curtains over the windows.

Tenna wasn’t helping; she just seemed to be enjoying watching Devi move things around.

“So, you really saw a kiss, did you?” she asked Jimmy.

Jimmy made some distressed kind of noise.

“Yesss,” he hissed. “I already told you I’m not making it up.”  Tenna smiled.

Devi hadn’t wanted things to get this weird, but in a way, she was glad they had. Jimmy had done something reasonably okay for once, and a freak stroke of optimism let her believe Johnny was going to come over and actually apologize for ignoring everyone. Something about agreeing with Jimmy felt contrary to every logical cell in her body, but Devi let herself do it.

She’d missed the choir room antics, maybe not as much as Jimmy had, but she still missed them. Living there had been Johnny’s idea, and the rest of the group had been nervous, but they did it.  Jimmy’s trailer and Devi’s apartment and getting food and clothes had all been things that Johnny spurred on initially. It stood to reason that they would have followed blindly when he said ‘Let’s get noticed.’ They’d had no idea what it would do to them, but Devi suspected that Johnny knew exactly what it would do, and he’d known since the first day they’d met.

Johnny didn’t bother to knock, he just showed up, Edgar following behind him. From the look on his face, Edgar really didn’t know what was going on. He also seemed a little twitchy.

“Ta-da, I’m here,” Johnny said blandly.

“Don’t sound so excited,” Devi answered him. Did he have to act like it was torture to see other people?

Everyone found a spot in Devi’s living room that was a close approximation to their usual spot in the old choir room office. Johnny smiled from his perch on the back of Devi’s couch.

“If you squint, it looks appropriate,” he said with a trace of a laugh. “I guess you guys want me to take charge or something again?”

Devi and Jimmy shrugged, and Tenna giggled. The group sent her strange looks and she excused herself to go get something from the kitchen, snickering as she left the room.

“Riiiight,” Johnny started, clasping his hands, “So anyway, I guess I’m here because you think I’ve been ignoring you. The obvious solution is to just stake out your couch until you get sick of me.” A few raised eyebrows later, Johnny laughed and continued.

“Okay, okay,” Johnny said, “for real. Getting right to the point, I don’t think things can stay the way they were before.” 

Jimmy crossed his arms and looked close to pouting.

“Nny, you can’t just say you’ll come over here and then not actually do anything,” he complained. Devi almost wanted to hear him whine. Almost.

“If you’d just  _wait_ ,” Johnny half-scolded, “I’d elaborate.” Jimmy huffed, but stayed quiet.  “We can’t even really  _go_  in the choir room anymore, you guys know that. This is not new information. Seems we changed a little since we moved in there, yeah?”

Devi laughed in the back of her throat, and Tenna came back from the other room while Johnny went on.

“I miss it, too, you know.  I wanted to be seen more than I wanted to live like that, though. I thought maybe I’d made this clear back when you guys started making noise with me. We’re at some kind of halfway point, now, I think…” He paused to think. Devi wasn’t sure what kind of ‘halfway’ he meant, but he didn’t continue on that vein.  “So what do you want with me? What do you need me to be when we get to  _not_  live in the van every few months?”

“Around,” Jimmy answered.  Devi bit her lip.

“I  _am_  around,” Johnny told him. “I’m at home like the rest of you. Come get me if you have to.”

“I  _did_! Look how well that worked out!”

“Maybe don’t leer in my windows! Knock on the door, even!”

Edgar coughed from the chair to Johnny’s left. “Like  _you_  did, right?”

Johnny opened his mouth and pointed, presumably to say something dramatic, then stopped. He gave Edgar a look that Devi couldn’t place. “Okay, fine,” he corrected, “but the window thing was extreme.”

Devi smirked. Perhaps there was something to Edgar that she’d been ignoring for years.

“Maybe,” she started, before she even realized she was talking, “we don’t need everything back the way it was as much as we think we do. I mean, I miss it, and I miss you,” she looked away from Johnny for a moment to turn to Edgar, “and I definitely thought you were a loser in the beginning, Edgar, sorry.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said. “ _I_  thought I was a loser.”

“But,” Devi continued, “I guess downtime at home is a good thing. We should just be meeting every now and then. We’re going to need to do some new songs eventually, anyway, right?”

Jimmy still didn’t look satisfied, and Devi found herself wondering what she’d been fussing about. Maybe Johnny did spend all his time with Edgar, but she spent all hers with Tenna. Johnny had as much a right to bitch that Devi was abandoning them. She also wasn’t juggling Tenna’s professions of love or experimenting with letting Tenna love her. There were reasons to stay with Edgar all that time.

“It just doesn’t feel like enough,” Jimmy said quietly. “It used to be all day, every day. Now it’s just Edgar who-”

“I don’t understand why I’m the only thing worth fighting over here,” Johnny interrupted. “Tenna gets Devi all day! No one’s angry at them?” He gestured emphatically at them and Devi was pleased that her mind still worked like Johnny’s every now and then.

“You’re different,” Jimmy muttered, looking away from Devi.

“Gee, thanks, Jimmy,” Devi said, not that she minded terribly that she wasn’t on the same pedestal as Johnny in Jimmy’s eyes.

“And here I thought you and Devi both wanted things to be different,” Johnny said, a tone of realization in his voice, “but it’s just you.”

“You said it yourself,” Jimmy answered bitterly. “‘Devi has Tenna.’ It’s just me dangling on the ends. I didn’t get a chance to not be.”

“You say that like there was some time when you could have had a chance.”

“I-”

“I didn’t scrape either of you two off of the invisible floor to be my own personal harem,” Johnny continued. “That wasn’t the idea. That was never the idea. That wasn’t even the idea with Edgar.”

“What  _is_  the idea with Edgar?” Tenna asked, using the cup of juice she’d gotten in the kitchen as a mask for her smile.

“Can we leave that?” Johnny asked. “Realistically, I can’t imagine I’d be imparting any information that would be new to you.”

“I don’t know,” Tenna said thoughtfully to her drink. “I mean, we’d rather hear it from the source, an’ all. Who believes Jimmy anyway?”

“Hey!” came the protesting squeak from Jimmy.

Johnny sighed once, glanced at Edgar, and then looked generally irritated, but to Devi’s surprise, actually answered.

“Seems we’re playing less of a game now than we used to be,” he said, staring at the empty space in the middle of the circle of people around him.  “I’m not trying to spite anyone, and to my knowledge, Edgar isn’t either. Just kinda worked out that way.”

“It didn’t just happen!” Jimmy protested. “Those were bizarre circumstances! You don’t just ‘work out’ to dating your best friend while he tries to get you to actually  _do that_  for weeks on end!” Jimmy stopped yelling abruptly, and looked like he wanted to cover his mouth. Devi braced for him to explode. 

“Best friend…,” Jimmy muttered. His mouth formed into a pained smile. “I’d been trying to avoid thinking about that for a long time. Might be time to get over that, huh?” He tried to laugh at himself, but it was painfully pathetic. Devi even felt bad for him, and she couldn’t remember that happening in her history of knowing him.

“Maybe,” Johnny said softly. Devi was sure she’d rarely, or conceivably never, seen Johnny look sympathetic. Edgar, however, she was used to seeing in a state of awkward and uncomfortable. Tenna continued hiding her face in her cup.

“I guess I’ll work on that, then.”

Edgar started to offer what Devi presumed to be an apology, but Johnny stopped him.

“Don’t. You didn’t do anything wrong,” Johnny told him, holding up a hand. He never looked at Edgar, but watched Jimmy for a few moments, and then smiled. “And, weirdly enough, breaking into my house aside, neither did Jimmy.”

A look crossed between Johnny and Jimmy. Devi didn’t have a name for it, but it looked promising. Johnny was so much harder to read than Tenna. It occurred to Devi for a moment that maybe Tenna wanted to be read.

As a group, they agreed to write something song-wise about how messed up things had gotten, and include it in their ‘resurrecting old songs’ act. Jimmy either took this well or faked taking it well and left as gracefully as he could. He lingered for moment looking at Johnny before he waved goodbye and closed the door behind him.

There was a silence while Johnny slid down from the back of Devi’s couch. When he hit the cushion there was a small cloud of dust.

“Sorry I let it slip, Nny,” Devi said, even just to break the silence. “I didn’t mean to have him break in on you guys.”

“Pff, it’s fine,” Johnny replied, tucking some strings of hair behind his ear. “I’d rather you never phrase it that way ever again, though.” He laughed weakly.

Tenna leaned forward, and opened her mouth, smiling gleefully. Devi clamped a hand over her mouth, and Tenna flailed her arms, spilling some water on the cushion beside her.

“That can’t have been good,” she said, glaring at Tenna.

“I was expecting to endure a little more than this, honestly,” Edgar offered, “so it’s not  _that_  bad.”

“I can let her talk if you want.”

“No, that’s quite okay. Carry on.”

Devi wrestled with Tenna for a few minutes before making her swear not to mention anything horrible. Tenna finally gave up and nodded. She slouched into her chair with a sulking expression when Devi let go of her.

“You’re no fun at all, Devi,” she pouted.

“You guys are free to go,” Devi told Johnny. “I don’t have any pressing issues with you.”

Johnny stood up and gave her a salute. Edgar could not have hidden his relief more poorly.

“We’ll see you in a few days,” Johnny said.

“Or a few months, whichever,” Devi answered, grinning.

“What’s the difference, right?”

Devi accompanied Johnny and Edgar to the door, and Johnny made some joke about Devi keeping an eye on Tenna. Devi rolled her eyes at him and told him to get the fuck out of her house. She shut the door behind them, and leaned back against it, letting out a long breath. A few moments later, she heard a kind of hum, and pressed her ear to the cold metal of the door.

“I’m not letting this go just because he’s upset about it.”  Edgar’s voice. He and Johnny were still standing in the hallway outside the apartment. Against her better judgment and what she thought must be ‘decent person laws’, she looked through the peep hole in the door.

Edgar had Johnny completely wrapped in his arms, and was talking with his face partly buried in Johnny’s hair.

“I’m not asking you to,” Johnny replied.

“I’m just letting you know.”

“Let me know at home, okay?” Johnny pushed Edgar away from him. “I think Tenna has enough fodder for now.” 

They walked down the hallway and vanished into a stair well. Devi felt a little dirty for watching, even though nothing had happened. She pressed her back on the door again and caught Tenna sitting across the room out of the corner of her eye.

“Was it steamy?” Tenna asked slyly.

Devi made a move for a pillow and aimed for Tenna’s head.

*****

In the few blocks it took to walk home, Edgar decided he wasn’t going to dodge around things anymore. Jimmy busting into his house had been it. He had been ready to take all of Jimmy’s wrath and any of Devi’s snarking, and even Tenna’s horrible jokes. He was done skirting around things.

He opened the front door, and he and Johnny stood in the entry way, staring at the staircase.

“Is it tomorrow yet?” Johnny asked.

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“So were you planning on all this charming me to be punctuated with awkward on such a regular basis?”

The defense mechanism again.

“Yeah, this was part of my diabolical plan from the start,” Edgar said, nodding. “I thought, ‘Hey, you know what’s  _really_  attractive? Weird silence and crazy stalkers. Now he’ll love me for sure!’”

“You’ve got me pinned. How did you know those were my favorite?” Johnny grinned at him.

“I’m just that good, really.”

Johnny laughed and rested his forehead on Edgar’s shoulder.

“Keep this up, and we’ll have no awkward ever again.”

Edgar wrapped his arms around Johnny and held tight. Johnny’s breath caught for a moment.

“I’d actually like to do something about that,” Edgar said, his jaw against the side of Johnny’s head. Johnny’s defense mechanism would have them joking at each other for days if he didn’t do something now.

“I’m okay with that,” Johnny said, after some delay.

“Are you really?” His breath grazed the top of Johnny’s ear and Edgar felt him shiver.

“Really.” He curled some of Edgar’s shirt into his fingers.

“Does this feel awkward to you?”

“In some sort of circular way, I think. Since it’s not supposed to, or because we’re focusing on it.” Talking into Edgar’s shirt, or to the floor, maybe.

“But you don’t feel like running away or joking at me.” Edgar had meant that to be a question.

“No.”

“So here’s a question, then,” Edgar said.

“Okay.”

“Do we keep this kind of thing up in front of everyone else?”

“Your funeral, Edgar. Just because Jimmy decided to feel all existential about it or whatever, doesn’t mean he isn’t going to tear you up if you grab me in front of him.”

Edgar put his chin on top of Johnny’s head.

“I shouldn’t have to worry about it,” he said.

“And the others shouldn’t have to be subjected to it.”

“God, what’s made you so charitable all of a sudden? Did I suck the insensitive jerk out of you or what?”

“No, really.” Johnny ducked out from under Edgar’s chin and looked at his eyes. Edgar still relished moments of actual eye contact. “This is fine, really. But they don’t need to see you desperately hanging all over me. It’s…” He drummed his fingers on Edgar’s shoulder, thinking.

“Inconsiderate? Rude?” Edgar ventured after a few moments.

“Not the words I would have used, but yes.”

“What would you have said?”

“‘Fucking lame,’ I think.’”

Edgar laughed. “Alright, alright. Fair enough. You’re probably right anyway.”

“Of course I am.” He grinned at Edgar.

“You’re going to have to stop smiling at me like that,” he said, “or I don’t think I’ll be able to let you go.”  Johnny smile changed from pleased with himself to something like predatory.

“Sure you will,” he said, and slid out of Edgar’s hold seemingly with out effort.

“I- How the hell do you do that?”

Johnny shrugged. “Just part of being amazing and talented and, um, what was the other one?”

“‘ _Incredible_.’”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

*****

Johnny hadn’t expected things to work out like this, not really.

He’d resigned himself to the fact that he was probably going to let himself fall for Edgar, but he hadn’t expected it to be so comfortable. Johnny had fallen asleep on Edgar in front of late night infomercials more times in the last few weeks than he was sure he wanted to admit. Edgar’s shoulder make satisfactory pillow material and Edgar holding him tightly for no reason at all every so often didn’t bother him at all. In fact, it had started to feel routine, and he found he enjoyed it.

The regular meetings with Devi and the others actually happened, and Jimmy seemed to improve with each one. Edgar had been stealthy in easing Jimmy into the idea of seeing him close to Johnny so that it took several meetings for Jimmy to even realize there had been a change.

Life in the van resumed soon afterwards. Johnny noted both Devi and Jimmy’s relief when he and Edgar did nothing out of the ordinary while locked in the van with the others.

People taking pictures of the Homicides obviously saw something new when they talked to Johnny. They kept saying, ‘Wow, this has come pretty far,’ and ‘Never thought it would last this long,’ but they never meant the Homicides as a whole; they were always nodding toward Edgar.  The first few had taken Johnny by surprise, so his answers to them were shaky and confused, but after the strange had worn away, he made sure to elaborate on the general awesome that was Edgar.  Edgar saw the humor in it after a few questions and also started talking about how cool he thought he was.

The only bumps in the road had been when people asked Jimmy and Devi about how they felt, and if they were seeing anyone. Jimmy had told the very first woman, “Your dad,” and continued on his way, fuming.  Devi politely told the first few people who asked about her and Tenna that nothing was happening, and had to be dragged away from pummeling the last one after being reasonable with nearly two dozen during the course of a week.

Johnny found himself on stages having small question and answer sessions in the middle of shows. Most people asked about him and Edgar, but others wanted to know inane things like the band’s favorite colors. One guy wanted to know what turned Devi on, so she walked to the front of the stage and threw a drumstick that nailed him in the ribs. Johnny had stood there holding a mic with his mouth hanging open for several seconds before he told the audience that Devi’s turn on was obviously crippling pain. Someone in the audience screamed that that was  _their_  turn on, and asked if Johnny would throw something at them. Johnny had bowed and smiled as sweetly as he possibly could in the general direction of the voice.

“That wouldn’t be terribly smart of me, would it?” he’d said. “I’d be cheating on Edgar in front a few hundred people.”  Some girls in the back had fainted, and Johnny had cackled to himself for what must have been several uncomfortable seconds before he cued the next song.

Stages in front of teeming masses of slobbering fans were among the most comfortable places on Earth.

*****

The Homicides stayed wherever they wanted at night, and no matter how much of a spectacle or nuisance they made of themselves, no one ever bothered them. They’d learned to accept that some of the benefits of being invisible had lingered on them, though Johnny insisted that he willed all their good fortune into being.  He didn’t know if they believed him anymore. 

The motel they’d chosen appeared tiny from the outside but the management had actually had the idea of building its floors underground, so it turned out to be rather spacious if still dingy. The people at the front desk were vague about how many floors there were down below.

Johnny ended up in a room with Edgar, while the others took their own rooms. The entire floor was theirs for the night, so all five of them played an eternal game of musical rooms for a while before settling on the ones they wanted. Tenna chose one for herself, but Johnny suspected that she wouldn’t be leaving Devi’s room for the remainder of the night.

Johnny and Edgar’s room was a miserable wreck, but the little motel had been pretty shady looking to begin with.

“This shitty painting is actually bolted to this wall,” Johnny reported, shaking the gaudy old frame that hung above the bed. Edgar was standing on a stack of chairs in the center of the room trying to reattach the light fixture that had crashed to the floor when Tenna had first flung the door open.

“I still don’t understand why you wanted the crappiest room on the floor,” Edgar said through his teeth, roll of duct tape hanging from between them.

“It’s kind of classy in its trashiness. Everything is bolted down like they think we’d want to steal it. It’s awesome.”

Edgar tore one last strip of duct tape off the roll and affixed it to the light bulb.

“There,” he said, stepping off the chairs. “Hopefully, we won’t burn to death in the night when this falls down again.”

“Only if you leave the light on all night, genius.”

“I don’t know, I would not be terribly surprised if this burst into flame just because it wanted to end its miserable existence in this place.”

“Well,  _that_ ’s cheery, thanks for that.” 

Edgar sat down on the end of the bed, and grinned at Johnny. “I’m sure it’s payback for something you’ve said.”

Johnny ignored him and fished around in the drawers in the bed side table. He pulled out a Bible and a large piece of plywood. Attached to the plywood was the remote for the ancient looking television in the corner of the room.

“Oh, this is great,” Johnny said gleefully. “Does Jimmy still have the camera?”

“I wasn’t aware he had one at all.”

“Yeah, I guess that was a long time ago, now that I think about it. Still, check this out,” Johnny said, handing the board to Edgar, “it’s actually screwed onto the wood.”

“That’s insane,” Edgar marveled, turning it over in his hands. “Who would want the remote to a television they can’t even steal?”

“Does it work?”

Edgar shrugged and rammed his thumb on the big green ‘ON’ button. The television flickered on, but showed nothing but black. Edgar frowned and pressed a few more buttons. Black on every channel. He scrolled a few times through several channels, though Johnny wasn’t sure if they’d ever get an indication that they’d cycled back to the beginning. Johnny felt something flicker in the back of his head as Edgar passed a channel that looked the slightest bit blacker.

“Wait, wait, go back,” Johnny said, hitting Edgar’s shoulder.

“What, you haven’t seen that episode of ‘Black on Black’ before?” Edgar asked angrily, moving his shoulder away from Johnny’s hand.

“Just go back.”   Edgar shrugged and channeled back down to the blacker channel.

“Something is wrong with this one,” Johnny said slowly.

“Nny, there’s something wrong with all of them. The whole thing is shot.”

“No, there’s something in there. That’s not a black screen.” Johnny walked up to the television and poked at the buttons on the front. When that didn’t do anything, he felt around to the back of it, but there was nothing but the cable connection and the base the television was bolted to.  He turned to Edgar and held out his hand.

“Gimme that,” he said, motioning at the remote board. Edgar humored him, and gave it up without a fuss.

“You know, there’s an old movie about a girl in a television…,” Edgar started.

“Yeah, but she was in a nice rustic cabin. I doubt there’s any wells to be thrown into under this shitty place,” Johnny said as he fussed with the buttons on the remote.

“Johnny, if Pepito comes out of that television, I’m sleeping with Tenna.”

“Wimp. Okay, here we go.” Johnny pressed two buttons at once, and the black in the picture remained unchanged for a few moments, but soon the image started to reveal itself as a close up of something in the background of a larger image. The image kept zooming out, yet it still didn’t look like anything concrete. There seemed to be some tentacles or limbs and maybe some teeth and claws, but it didn’t look like anything. The pieces just writhed against the screen and made a sickening purring sort of noise.

“Is this some kind of medical show?” Edgar asked, squinting at the screen.

“I’m… not sure.” Johnny kept zooming out. The black that had formerly taken up the entire screen was now a tiny triangle in the corner of the screen. Suddenly the coils of whatever they were looking at began moving rapidly, and the mass of flesh and teeth parted to reveal a few dozen eyes that stared out of the television and at Johnny pointing the remote in their direction.

Johnny froze. He wanted to turn the television off, but his muscles wouldn’t listen to him. The creature made some noises like scraping against glass and concrete at the same time. Johnny heard the sounds from the television, but he was sure he heard them around him at the same time. His vision started getting fuzzy and he heard voices that weren’t his. He kept begging his hand to move and change the channel or just go limp and stop provoking the thing behind the screen but nothing moved.

It knew he was there, and it wanted out again.

The scraping got louder and higher and Johnny felt part of his brain black out, while the rest of him stood there still frozen by the creature behind the screen.  The scraping escalated further and the pictures that had been bolted to the walls began to vibrate. The light came loose from its duct tape hold and swung from a noose of wires and circuitry. Part of the drywall cracked, and a crack shot across the bottom of the television screen. Johnny heard screaming and he didn’t know who it belonged to.

There was a spark, black and then a flash of a small explosion.

Johnny opened his eyes in a strange bed, hugged tightly against Edgar.

He tried to sit up and his flailing woke Edgar.

“No, no, no,” Edgar protested, trying to hold Johnny’s arms down. “No, stop. Stop, calm down. Nny, please!”

Johnny stopped fighting, and looked around in a panic. The light fixture from the ceiling was gone, and the television had a giant hole in the screen. A lamp that was secured to the bed side table was the source of the only yellowed light in the room. There was a humming somewhere in the building. Humming and scraping. He didn’t remember dressing in these giant clothes.

“Edgar we have to go.”

“Nny, what the hell happened?”

Johnny tried to pull away, to escape. Edgar held him tighter.

“Dammit, let go! We have to go! We need to find everyone else and get out. We need out, oh god, how deep are we?”

“Johnny, please!”

“Edgar, I’m not fucking around! We have to go! We need to get out of here! Let go!”

Edgar looked frightened, and released his hold on Johnny’s arms. Johnny shot off the bed and ran to the door, tearing open every lock that they’d made so sure to secure just a few hours ago. He flung the door open, let it slam against the wall beside it, and looked at Edgar, who was sitting on the bed, still looking concerned, but not in any kind of hurry.

“Edgar, I don’t know what you need me to say for you to take this seriously, but you need to stand up and help me find everyone else, or so help me, I will drag you out of here unconscious.”

Edgar stood up and followed him. 

Johnny yelled through the hall and started banging on all the doors as he ran by them. The hall seemed to go on forever, and now that he saw the surroundings he was in, he wondered how they’d ever agreed to this place. The walls looked stained and warped. Drywall was cracking, floorboards were broken and things looked like they were seeping in from above and below. Things were leaning towards him.

“Nny, what happened?!” Edgar yelled, running behind Johnny in one sock and some plaid flannel pants. “What are you doing?!”

Devi emerged from her room groggily, and Johnny flailed wildly at her, yelling that they all needed to get out of the building.

“Nny, are you fucking- Do you know what fucking  _time_  it is?!” Devi yelled, clad in some sweatpants and a small black shirt. Tenna appeared from behind her in fully matched pajama set and orange fuzzy slippers.

“Get out, get out, get out,” Johnny chanted at them, “Please, come on, we don’t know how deep we are, and I don’t think the elevator is safe.”   Devi gave Edgar a glare.

“What the hell did you do to him?”

“I didn’t!” Edgar protested. “He freaked out doing something to our television, and there was this scraping noise and he wouldn’t move, and one thing led to another, so I… god, I don’t know, I guess I panicked, he scared me. I threw our light at the TV when it fell off again, and then the remote, for good measure. He just fell over after that, and he woke up like this.”

Jimmy emerged from his room in some long shorts, and started to complain to Edgar about the noise. Johnny got to him first.

“Jimmy,” Johnny pleaded, grabbing Jimmy’s hand, “if you have ever wanted to do something for me, you would convince them to get the fuck out of this place.” Jimmy looked at Johnny with a dazed expression, and then up at Edgar and Devi, who alternated between looking lost and annoyed.

“Let’s go,” Jimmy said.

Their footsteps echoed in the stairwells, as they tailed Johnny up the stairs. The stairs shook and creaked and something made angry scraping and screaming noises with increasing volume no matter how high they went.

“What the hell  _is_  that?!” Tenna yelled, taking the steps two at a time. Her very plush orange slippers squeaked every time she put her foot down.

“It’s nothing!” Johnny yelled. “Just keep going!”

Stairwells stopped being stairwells and started being ramps and what looked like abandoned handicapped access points. Some of them went right into ugly, stained walls. Jimmy had tried to stop and make some jokes about wheelchairs, but Edgar grabbed his wrist and pulled him along.

“This is crazy!” Jimmy shrieked as he tried to gain his footing. “What the hell is even back there?! Did he tell you what we’re running from? Edgar, come on!”

Edgar let go of Jimmy’s wrist and he hit the floorboards with a smack that startled everyone into stopping. Somewhere below them, they heard things collapsing, people screaming, and a roar that sounded like it was generated by implosion.  Jimmy looked around him and stood up slowly.

“What is that?” he asked softly.

“It’s getting closer,” Johnny said.

“Nny, come on, tell me this is some sort of game,” Devi begged. She sounded a little more desperate than Johnny thought she wanted to.

“No, I don’t think so. It used to be in the wall. How did it get in the TV?”

“Nny?”

“Someone knew it was there.”

“Nny!”

Johnny looked at Edgar. He wasn’t sure if that was who had last spoken, but he thought so.  “We need to keep going.”

Johnny turned around and headed to the next way up and out. He felt the others pause, and he turned to look at them. They were regarding each other nervously, and eventually Devi, Jimmy and Tenna seemed to look for answers in Edgar.

“I don’t know,” Edgar said hopelessly in response to the begging stares. “I’m as scared and confused as you are.”

“If this was anyone else but Nny…” Devi mumbled.

“Then you’d all get eaten,” Johnny said. “Let’s go.” The group gave one more nervous look at each other, then semi-reluctantly followed Johnny. Another stairwell, filled with webs and a few bugs. Jimmy complained that he’d crunched one as they sprinted up the stairs, while Tenna expressed disappointment that she hadn’t – a crunch and a squeak at the same time would have made for some interesting sound effects, she thought.

No one laughed.

The stairwell ended abruptly several floors up in an empty room. There were two ladders on the far wall and Johnny ran for them. Grinding noises and humming sounds leaked into everything.

“Oh, you have to be kidding me!” Devi yelled. “Nny, this is crazy!”

“NO!” Johnny yelled at her from several rungs above, “No, this is not crazy. Crazy is that thing in the TV. I know that thing. If we don’t get out of here now… It used to live in the wall.”

“Nny, please, this is really not…” Edgar’s voice.

“No, no, no!” Johnny shouted, shaking his head, still climbing. He looked over his shoulder and saw that despite what his friends were saying, they were still following him. “Just trust me, okay?”

And behind him were four people who’d followed him into everything. Into a choir room, onto roofs, and into basements, and onto stages with stars on their faces and make up on every inch of their skin. 

“Trust me.”

“Okay.”

And they climbed. The building looked like something had happened there once, something not very nice. It had been cleaned, but something was still there. They’d missed it when they cleaned, whoever they had been, and the thing had been waiting to be rediscovered. Leftovers from something that had long since disappeared. Something that should have died long ago. Something that used to need regular attention to stay put.

Something that was making regular screaming and sliming and slithering and roaring behind them.

What had been keeping it there until now?

Another roar echoed behind them six more floors up, and Devi showed signs of panic.

“Nny, what’s going on?” He didn’t answer.

“How deep were we?”  He didn’t know who said that.

They climbed into a lightless room, and Johnny felt everything shaking around him. His friends, the walls, the air, the dust, the bugs. It was familiar. There were things coming for them. Things that had probably already destroyed the level they’d been staying on.

“It’s okay,” Johnny said. “This is the top. We’ll be fine.” The silence behind him was not terribly supportive.

“Really,” he stressed. “Come on, here, someone take my hand.” He felt several hands at once.

“Guys, this is really not the time for this. Here, gimme Edgar.”  Edgar’s hand. “Okay, some one take his other one, make some kinda line, alright? There’s no light in here but there are stairs to the top in the corner.”

“Are you sure?” Devi again.

“Yes.” He was sure, and he hated that he was sure. Things buzzed at him, and he tried desperately to focus on remembering and not remembering at the same time. Remember where the stairs are. Don’t remember why you remember the stairs.

They made their way across the room, which was covered in wood that had long since rotted in places. Tenna got her foot lodged in the floor when a plank broke, which had made a terrifying squeak, but other than that, and the collective shiver that Johnny felt all the way to his hand when something roared again, they made it to the stair case with no trouble at all. At the top, Johnny pushed on the ceiling, and the fluorescent light that poured in told him they’d hit the lobby. A fancy rug fell from the top of the trap door, and coughed up a cloud of dust.

The women at the reception desk ran over to help, though none was needed.

“How on Earth did you get down there?” one of them asked. “We closed that off years ago!”

“I think we’ll be going home now,” Johnny told her. He looked at her, and heard the creature tearing at the floors below him. Shame, she seemed like a nice lady.

Devi signed them out as fast as she could, her signature spilling out of the little white square that she was given many times over. The woman behind the desk asked if she needed a cup of water or some sugar. Devi told her no, but suggested that she go on break soon. The woman giggled politely at her.

The doors to the van could not be unlocked fast enough, and Tenna practically had it in reverse before everyone’s limbs were securely inside. Johnny refused to move from the rear window, so everyone who wasn’t driving watched with him. They watched the building shudder a few times, and then seem to swell. Devi held her breath, and Tenna kept yelling ‘what’ with increasing volume from the driver’s seat.

Johnny let his finger hover over the glass. “Right…,” the building heaved and collapsed in on itself as tentacles and gore shot from it in every direction when Johnny poked the glass, “there.” 

Devi backed away from the window slowly and climbed back into the front seat with Tenna.  “What happened, what happened, what is it?” Tenna sounded frantic, and the van lurched as she sped up and slowed down with alternating panic about the motel and worry about the speed limit.

“Just keep driving, Ten.”

They spent the night in the van, driving as far away from the building as possible. Tenna was so jittery she forgot a few turn signals and caused a guy on his bike to crash into a ditch. They didn’t stop to see what happened to him.

“Fuck him, keep driving,” Jimmy had said when Tenna put on the break.

Johnny stayed in the far back of the van, with Edgar wrapped tightly around him. Jimmy didn’t object, and in fact poked his head back and told Edgar he’d be in the front seats trying to keep Tenna calm so they didn’t escape Hell only to die hitting a telephone pole.

When the sun rose, they were still driving. The radio announced sometime around a quarter to seven in the morning that a town that no one had heard of before had simply ceased to exist the night prior. Police were looking into it, the announcer said.

“He’s lying,” Johnny said into Edgar’s shoulder.  Jimmy and Devi turned to look at him, and Tenna glanced into her mirror. 

“He’s lying. There aren’t any police there anymore. There’s nothing there anymore. And nothing will be there ever again.”

*****

Johnny was alarmingly quiet after the incident with the motel. Edgar tried to joke with him and things fell flat. References to cleaning layers of paint off of furniture or jokes at Edgar’s own expense got no reaction at all. Jabs at Jimmy’s fanboying or Devi’s relationship with Tenna sparked only stares, as though Johnny was only processing that he might know the people Edgar talked of.

Given all of that, Edgar felt a little guilty that he enjoyed the final side effect of the motel-induced crazy. Since the night they’d returned, Johnny spent every night curled up next to Edgar, clutching sheets or Edgar’s shirt desperately in his sleep.

Edgar held him, since he thought it helped, but he didn’t really know what to do for him. He tried to ask about the television, about what Johnny had seen, about what was wrong now. He even tried to ask if Johnny was afraid of the thing coming to get him, even if it sounded childish and dumb. He’d not been given any real answers.

Finally, at an hour of the morning that Edgar had rarely seen, he was woken up by Johnny shaking him violently.

“Edgar, wake up!”

“Whoa, whoa, okay, what, what?” He shook his head, and his eyes tried to focus on Johnny.

“The motel,” Johnny said urgently. Edgar was silent for a moment, hoping Johnny would go on. When he didn’t, Edgar tried to nudge it out of him.

“What about it?” Quietly.

“The motel,” he said again.

“Johnny, please.”

Johnny tightened a grip on Edgar’s collar that Edgar hadn’t even noticed he had.

“It was my house, Edgar. I lived there.”

“In the motel?”

“It wasn’t a motel! I lived there! The rooms underneath, the … thing. The thing in the wall. I lived there. It got into the TV somehow.”

“Nny, slow down.”

“I knew the room because I lived there,” Johnny repeated, burying his head in Edgar’s shirt. “I remembered the rooms. And the thing remembered me.” Johnny was still half-heartedly shaking him. Edgar took his hands and held them together.

“I’m awake, you can stop shaking me.”

“It knew I was there.”

“From the TV?”

“Yes… You think I’m crazy.”

“No,” Edgar replied gently. “I remember crazy. This isn’t quite it. You’re acting weird though.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Nny, the town disappeared overnight. I believe you. We’re all  _alive_  because you went a little crazy in there.”

Johnny’s breathing, which had until now been frantic and panicked, slowed until Edgar could barely hear it. He pulled himself away from Edgar, and Edgar released his hands.

“This is going to sound bad,” Johnny warned.

“O…kay.”

“How long ago did that happen?”

“About a week.”

Johnny nodded. “I see.”  Edgar figured he really didn’t.  “I don’t…remember any time passing. The last thing I remember is being in the van.”

“That would explain a lot,” Edgar said.

“What happened to everything? The last few shows and stuff, I mean.”

“We had to cancel them. We couldn’t even get you to speak, let alone sing.”

Johnny rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “I hadn’t wanted to remember any of this stuff, Edgar.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” Edgar said quietly. “I didn’t want you to either.”

“What were the odds of that? Of going to that one place? How many motels were out there?”

“I can’t even believe you’re asking me that.”

“Is it the key?” Johnny asked, fingers brushing the metal key that hung from the dark ribbon around his neck.

“Nny, it’s not just the key by now,” Edgar said. “It can’t be. Things are getting weirder than just Pepito and his key to hell.”

“It’s coming after me.”

Maybe asking that question earlier hadn’t been as dumb and childish as Edgar thought.

“Still?”

“Yes.”

Edgar knew he’d regret asking, but he went ahead anyway. “Really?”

“I think so.”

There was a long silence. Edgar worried that Johnny had crazied himself to sleep, or that he’d willed himself to stop breathing.

“You know,” Johnny said softly, “we walked through your room.”

“My…?”

“The one I killed you in.”

“Thanks for not saying something while we were there.”

“I thought it would be appreciated,” Johnny said, shrugging. “I didn’t want you to freak out.”

“I was doing that pretty well already, actually.” Edgar laughed quietly, and slid over closer to Johnny. “I was terrified that something was wrong with you,” he said, pulling Johnny into a hug.

“I’m pretty sure you’ve known something was wrong with me from the start.”

“Maybe,” Edgar replied, pressing his face against Johnny’s hair, “but I’m used to your standard, regular, everyday wrong. That shit was just horrifying.”

Johnny moved away from him and looked at Edgar’s eyes. He squinted, as though he was trying to find something, then smiled.

“Thanks,” he said, ruffling Edgar’s hair. “I’ll be fine, okay?”

“Okay.” Edgar tried to smile, but it didn’t work the way he wanted, and he suspected that he looked a little dumb. “You’re welcome, I guess.”

Johnny laughed at him.

*****

Devi stopped by to see him, and then Jimmy. Johnny thought the concern was nice, but he hadn’t been in the hospital or even really in a coma, so he didn’t quite understand the fuss.  Devi and the others seemed so much more rattled by the experience than he’d expected them to be. 

Edgar had gone to the store to replace their stale tortilla chips, so Johnny was left alone with Devi and Jimmy. That might have been Edgar pulling a ‘considerate like Tenna’ move, but Johnny wasn’t sure. He thought to ask about Tenna, but thought if she hadn’t shown up, maybe it was bad, and let it be.

Devi had hugged him the moment she laid eyes on him.

“I don’t know what happened to you,” she sniffled into his shirt, “and I don’t know whether to kill you or tell you I love you, but god, you scared the shit outta me.”

“I’m… sorry?”

“Don’t say that, that’s even scarier.”

Johnny grinned at her, and she lamely punched him in the shoulder.

“Fuck you,” she said, smiling back at him.

That had been all Devi needed. Jimmy had been a little more roughed up by the experience of scaling stairs for his life.

“I’m glad you’re not crazy,” he offered, when finally left alone with Johnny.

“Yeah, I’m sorta glad too,” Johnny answered. Jimmy clenched his fists a few times, but wouldn’t say anything.

“Umm, Jimmy?”

“I don’t know what happened back there,” Jimmy choked out, “but we’re all alive because of you.  Thanks for saving me too.”

Johnny almost laughed. “What, you thought I wouldn’t?”

“You had Edgar with you already,” Jimmy explained, gesturing weakly. “You could have just… left.”

“I think you’re missing a key point of my relationships,” Johnny said, standing from his spot on the corner of Edgar’s bed. “He’s my best friend. I should probably even stop calling him that, but ‘best friend’ is a label I find easier to swallow.” Jimmy flinched and looked away from him. “But,” Johnny continued, sliding around to look Jimmy in the eye, “there’s nothing in me that’s going to let some tentacle monster take you and Devi when I know I can save you from it. I think there used to be, once, but I hope it died somewhere along the way. You guys were it for me for a long time. I can’t afford to lose the only connections I’ve got.”

Jimmy looked strange. “I wasn’t sure,” he said quietly.

“I’d miss you if you died, you miserable fucker.” Johnny grinned at him, and Jimmy stared blankly at him for a moment before returning the grin.

“I’m not gonna stop, Nny.”

Johnny blinked at him. “Stop what?”

“Following you.”

“That’s okay. Just stay away from my windows.”

*****

 

Edgar returned from the store after Devi and Jimmy had left. Johnny was in the living room, trying to make the television do something, though Edgar wasn’t sure what.

“So, I had an interesting experience at the store,” Edgar announced, setting down the bag of tortilla chips.

“Yeah? What happened?”

“I was standing in line at the check out, and this lady in front of me recognizes me, which is weird, now that I think about it, because she was something like seventy…”

“Weird. So, what’d she say?”

“She looks at me, and she goes, ‘Oh, honey, you’re in that killing invisible band, aren’t you?’”

Johnny made a face.

“Yeah, I know. Just wait, it gets better,” Edgar continued, “She looks me up and down and pats my shoulder and says, ‘I’m glad you can be publicly gay in this day and age, boy. You done good.’”

Johnny’s jaw dropped and he looked utterly horrified.

“I KNOW! I just stood there. I couldn’t even answer her. It was just like, “Gay?” I never thought of it like that. I never thought I fit that.”

“You still don’t,” Johnny said.

“And I thought, ‘I just like Nny, lady, really. The guy behind me is not doing anything for me at all.’ And I thought, you,” he gestured towards Johnny, “you know, you’re just – well, no.”

“Hey, thanks. That’s great.”

“You know what I mean! It’s like I’m just… you-sexual. Nny-sexual.”

Johnny snorted. “Something like that on my end, too, I think,” he replied, laughing.

*****

They’d ended up watching something awful on late night television again. It was rare that Edgar and Johnny ever watched something that was supposed to be taken seriously, and the things that had been made to be taken seriously were hilarious for that very reason.

Of course, Johnny assumed his usual ritual of using Edgar as a full-body pillow. Since the episode with the motel, Edgar had gotten used to Johnny clinging desperately to him, and while it was significantly less desperate now that Johnny’s brain seemed to have returned to him, it was unquestionably more comfortable. Edgar thought they got more comfortable with each other every day, and he relished the idea.  He no longer had to be concerned with how creepy it sounded to ask Johnny where he wanted to sleep – Johnny would follow him to the couch as casually as he would Edgar’s bed. They’d sleep in a sort of heap, with Johnny’s arms draped over Edgar’s ribs.

Edgar had been trying to fall asleep to the sounds of a man screaming, unconvincingly, that the demon spleen was going to devour them all.  Johnny, however, found the man hilarious, so Edgar would be jostled from sleep, almost always at a crucial sleep-deciding moment, by Johnny laughing at some horrendously overdone line, or some obvious plastic monsters being puppeted close to the screen.

“I wonder how you enjoy these so much,” Edgar said groggily.

“What are you talking about? This is gold.”

“You’d think after you’d seen so many people fuck up in the attempt at being serious, it would get old.”

“Funny,” Johnny replied, his breath near Edgar’s neck, “you’d think after seeing so many people excel at being serious, it would get old.”

“Point taken.”

“Besides, you don’t have to watch them if you don’t want to,” Johnny added. “Despite how this may look, I’m not holding you down.”

“Oh god, get him off, he’s crushing my ribs.” Edgar mimicked the distressed woman on the television as best he could, flailing arms included.

“You’re a natural B-Movie star, Edgar. Let’s build a little city for you to menace out of some construction paper and film it.” Johnny ran the back of his hand under Edgar’s jaw. “We’d be rich,” he hissed.

“That band thing wasn’t working out anyway.”

“Do you like it?”

“Like what?”

“Playing. With me. With all of us.”

“With you specifically,” Edgar answered, running his fingers along the side of Johnny’s head. “But I guess the other instruments are nice, too.”

“We’d make a sad duo.”

“I don’t think so.” Edgar curled his fingers under Johnny’s jaw. When Johnny closed his eyes at the touch, Edgar took the very rare opportunity to catch Johnny off guard.

It still surprised him when Johnny didn’t just freeze up and lifelessly permit kisses, but actually responded to them. Thin arms around his neck or fingers in his hair made Edgar shudder, and it was wonderful.

“I feel a little delirious when you do that, sometimes,” Edgar managed afterwards.

“Will suck the coherent right out of you.”

“It’s just that kisses like that used to be really far-fetched fantasies for me, you know?”  
  
"And what are they now?"  
  
"You can't just ask. That's cheating isn't it?"  
  
"I don't think so," Johnny answered, stretching. "It's communication or something like that."  
  
"Or something?"  
  
"Yes." Sly grin.  
  
"I don't think about things like that terribly often, really." Edgar adjusted his glasses.   
  
"So you're going to tell me," Johnny said, tracing Edgar's jaw, "that you spent  _years_  aching after me, but not anymore?"  
  
"I didn't say that."  
  
"Then what are you going to say instead?" Fingertips grazing Edgar's neck.   
  
"I," Edgar coughed, "am not sure."  
  
"Then here's a question," Johnny purred. "What about me did you like? You fantasized about kissing me on occasion, right?"  
  
Edgar nodded.  
  
"So you find me attractive on some level, then."  
  
"Of course I do. What kind of question is that?"  
  
"A legitimate one," Johnny answered. He was still lying on Edgar, but had turned onto his side. He tended towards this cat-like behavior when they found themselves like this - stretching and clawing at Edgar’s shirt very much included.  
  
"I am having a hard time following here," Edgar confessed. "This... this doesn't sound like you. Are you actually bothered by thinking that I don't find you attractive?"  
  
"No," Johnny replied, smiling. He raked a nail down the side of Edgar's neck. "I'm not bothered at all because I know you do. I admit I'm not sure that we're looking at the same person, and often find myself questioning your tastes, but I know you do."  
  
"Soo..."  
  
"So am I attractive to you psychologically? As some kind of fucked up kindred spirit?" He rolled onto his back. Edgar thought he really should have seen this quirk coming. Johnny rarely looked at anyone when he talked to them, and frequently got lost in wood grain and carpet squares; the fact that he would choose to pull at Edgar's shirts or stretch himself out in odd ways when they were close rather than actually look at Edgar didn't really surprise him terribly.  
  
"Nny, I really don't think I'm fucked up enough to be a kindred spirit of yours."  
  
"I love you, too."  
  
"Come on, really."  
  
Johnny laughed against Edgar's neck, and then used Edgar's shoulders to pull himself closer to Edgar's face. Edgar felt breath against his ear.  
  
"So, it's not kindred spirit attraction," Johnny breathed. "Then perhaps it's emotional?"  
  
"It's..." Hot. Edgar felt sure the burn on the skin around his ear was going to melt his brain. "It's sort of a combination, I think."   
  
"Of?" Johnny, purposely, from what Edgar could tell, held the 'f.' Edgar shivered.  
  
"What are you trying to get at?"  
  
"This is interesting to me," Johnny answered. "Psychology, and all."  
  
"Is that what they're calling this now?"  
  
"You don't think I'm telling the truth," Johnny said, winding part of the collar on Edgar's shirt in his fingers.   
  
"Maybe you're not," Edgar choked, trying to move Johnny's hand from his neck, "but it rarely affects the outcome of our conversations."  
  
"And yet," Johnny sighed into his ear, "you still like me."   
  
"You might need to remind me of why," Edgar said, trying to ignore the burn that was spreading to his neck. "You also need to get your knee out of my stomach."   
  
Johnny obliged and moved his leg, but did not seem interested in leaving Edgar's ear un-breathed into.  
  
"I can't do that," he said, "because that's what I'm asking you."  
  
Somehow, Edgar had gotten completely turned around in this conversation, and he wasn't sure how it had happened.  
  
"That's really not the same question," Edgar stalled.  
  
"But it's pretty close."   
  
"It's on an emotional level, and a personality level, too, I think. When you start with those, physical attraction tends to follow doesn't it?" Edgar was determined to steer this towards psychology.  
  
"It does," Johnny answered, nodding. "This is probably why we worked out in the first place. Knowing that someone else is attracted to you automatically makes that person more attractive to you, even if just a little."  
  
"So I somehow looked like less of a loser while I was trying to convince you that this was a good idea?"   
  
"No, your sheer force of lose was so great that there was pretty much nothing left to redeem you." Johnny grinned against the side of Edgar's head. "I think you caught me off guard somewhere. I was unassuming in the face of such sheer fail."  
  
"Why on Earth do I put up with you?"  
  
"I can think of a few reasons." His arm draped over Edgar's chest. Breath on one side of his face now, and fingertips on the other. "So we've established that by liking my brain, you now like to look at me."  
  
"Wait, what?"  
  
"Aaannnd," right in Edgar's ear again, "this brings us back to where we started."  
  
"It... does?"  
  
"Yes. It does."  
  
A few things clicked in Edgar's head, but he wasn't sure what to do with them.   
  
"I think you're twisting things around here," Edgar said slowly.  
  
"Am I? You don't find me attractive by way of our scientific theory then?"  
  
"Not by the theory, no."  
  
"So then you do anyway, and the theory really doesn't matter."  
  
"I-" Edgar stopped. "Yes. Yes, okay."  
  
"So how deep does that go?"  
  
"How deep?"  
  
"How much?"  
  
Edgar hummed part of his song. Johnny actually stopped clawing at Edgar's shirt for a moment.   
  
"It's a bit like that," Edgar said after he'd hummed through a verse or two.  
  
"I think that finding someone physically attractive really implies a few things, and you're ignoring them."  
  
"Did it occur to you that maybe despite wanting you desperately I was trying not to be a jerk?" Shit, wait.  
  
"Oh, really?" There was breath in syllables that should have been physically impossible to contain it.   
  
"Yes."  
  
"So you lied to me."  
  
"What?"   
  
"There are some fantasies left in there after all."

With that, Johnny picked himself off of the couch, and wandered into the other room. Edgar heard the refrigerator open. All of his skin was burning.

 

Two days later, Edgar stood in the archway leading into the dining room he never used. The conversation with Johnny on the couch had eaten its way into his brain, and it consumed him. He’d thought the burning would have died down by now, but the sensation in his neck and under his ear was just as intense two days later. He tried ice packs, and thought it wasn’t just his imagination that he melted them in record time. Johnny had asked him why he’d stuck his neck in the sink when he saw Edgar’s soggy shirt.

Edgar managed the few steps to the other side of the stairs.

Johnny was sitting on the couch, scribbling away in a notebook. At first glance, he looked like his younger self clad in the shoddily sewn shirt and socks full of holes that he tended toward on the weekends. Hair that was never allowed to fade from whatever shade of blue Johnny liked that particular week and the lingering look of Tenna’s Homicides make-up pointed away from younger Johnny. The combination of the two was strange and fascinating to Edgar, but he wasn’t sure if that was the effects of Johnny’s little game from the other day talking or a genuine interesting contrast.

Edgar slipped into the space between Johnny and the arm of the couch. All their most important interactions had taken place on the couch, so this felt appropriate. He slid his arms around Johnny’s waist and Johnny just then seemed to notice that Edgar was there.

“Hey,” Edgar said. Johnny looked at Edgar, Edgar’s hands, and then back at his notebook.

“Hey,” Johnny echoed.

“You said something the other day that interested me,” Edgar tried. How else he was going to bring this up, he didn’t know.

“Oh, really?” Casually disinterested, like Edgar had just told him the sky was blue and that he’d seen a bird in it.

“Yes,  _really_.”

“I don’t remember.”

There was some kind of game going on here.

“Don’t  _remember_? You were pretty into it before.”

“Was I?”

A game.  Johnny was obviously toying with him, and it was ridiculous. He’d managed to get this mess all wormed into Edgar’s brain, and now was pretending it hadn’t happened. Then, somewhere in Edgar’s thought processes, a piece fell into place, and there was sudden realization. Edgar didn’t quite understand how it had happened, but he’d been seduced into seducing Johnny. A moment’s reflection made Edgar wonder why that hadn’t clicked before.

“You’re not listening to me,” Edgar breathed into Johnny’s ear.

A shiver. “Now I am.”

“Are you toying with me?”

“Maaaybe.”

“I am considering indulging you.”

"Are you, now?"  
  
"Unless you don't want to hear about this."  
  
"Mm?"  
  
"You seemed inclined to expose all of my fantasies, before," Edgar muttered into Johnny's neck. "Not anymore?"

Johnny let the notebook fall to the floor and leaned into Edgar.

“I could be re-inclined, if need be,” he answered, smirking.

“There seems to be a need here.” Edgar let his teeth graze Johnny’s ear before he even had time to think about doing it. Johnny tensed up for a moment, but relaxed almost immediately.

“I think you made this a little too easy,” Johnny told him, brushing fingertips around Edgar’s ear. God, Johnny really  _had_  wanted to be pursued.

“You’re a manipulative bastard, and I’m fairly sure this makes the previously mentioned need even worse.”

“Here I thought I was going to get to have some fun with you.” He ran his fingers across Edgar’s scalp once. Four trails of burning skin.

“I think that’s what I’m asking you for now.” Teeth against the skin on Johnny’s neck.

“I don’t know,” Johnny said, “Maybe I’ll think about it.” He curled his fingers under the collar of Edgar’s shirt as he spoke.

“Don’t make me bite you,” Edgar growled.

“Please,” Johnny said, grinning. “That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?”

Edgar’s fingers brushed bare skin underneath Johnny’s deteriorating old shirt. Johnny twitched a little, but whether it was at the touch near his ribs or the bite on his neck, Edgar didn’t know. He also didn’t care. He went to remove the offending shirt entirely, but stopped suddenly. Pressed his nose against Johnny’s temple and spoke into his ear again.

“May I?”

One more line to cross.

“Yes."

*****

 

“So have you noticed?” Tenna asked.

“Noticed what?”

“So you haven’t noticed.”

“Ten, what?”

“Edgar and Johnny.”

“God,” Devi sighed, exasperated, “What about them now? You aren’t satisfied with having called it so long ago, are you?”

“Something changed,” Tenna said, grinning.

“What?”

“Johnny really trusts him,” Tenna answered, raising her eyebrows.

“That’s nothing new.”

Tenna started laughing, and Devi thought maybe she’d just snapped.

“Maybe Jimmy will notice,” she laughed through her words.

Devi had suspected Tenna of sniffing markers again, until she talked to Jimmy. Comparing sanity notes with Jimmy seemed a little backwards, but he’d been surprising her lately.

“It’s hard to look at them anymore,” Jimmy told her.

“‘Anymore’?” she asked. “Wasn’t it hard before?”

“Yeah, but, just…,” Jimmy motioned to nothing, “look at them.”

“I do, and I don’t see anything different than I did before. You and Tenna shared the fucking markers, didn’t you?”

“Markers?”

“Never mind. Explain this shit to me. What’s different?”

Jimmy looked a little disturbed. “Johnny doesn’t, and hasn’t, let anyone that close before.”

Devi raised an eyebrow at him, and he gave her a ‘fill in the blank, moron’ face. Devi wanted to go find Tenna and smother her with a pillow for making her hear this from Jimmy.

*****

Edgar couldn’t pinpoint why, but he felt like he was being stared at. When he shared this concern with Johnny, Johnny hadn’t thought much of it.

“You’re on TV occasionally, Edgar,” he’d said, trying to glue something he’d knocked off the wall and broken one too many times back to its spot on the wall. “Just stick, you fucker, and we’ll both be a lot happier. You’re on TV,” he said again, “people are going to look.”

“Why are you even bothering with that? We’re going to be gone for a few months.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said, applying pressure, “and if it doesn’t fall off in the time that we’re gone, I can assume I’m never going to have to put up with knocking this thing over again.”

“I don’t need it, you know. You can just get rid of it.”

“Shut up. This is not about wanting the damn thing now; this is the principle of the thing.”

“Whatever you want.” Edgar walked into the other room to round up some last minute items, and check over what they’d already packed.

“Are we leaving from Devi’s again?” Johnny asked, presumably still holding the cracked ceramic mess against the wall.

“Don’t we always?” Edgar shrugged. “The van’s already there, and we don’t have much to transport. Plus, this is that route that circles back over home, so we’ll be back here in the middle sometime.”

“Just check- FUCK!” Johnny’s outburst erupted over the sound of shattering. “Shit, I’m gonna be picking this out of my hands for a week. Do we have something bigger than a Band-Aid?”

“No. Um, do I want to see this?”

“Prooobably not. Let’s just go check Devi’s, she’s got that store near her place. Um. Yeah, this is bad. Can you carry my stuff?”

“Are you going to bleed to death from your palms?”

“Most likely.”

“Well, give me a heads up before you kick the bucket, okay?”

Johnny clicked his tongue. “Will do.”

*****

“And you’re sure?”

“Yes, Devi, I can tell these things.”

“You’ve got some kind of sex radar or something?”

“ _I_  think so,” Tenna said proudly, putting on a mock-snooty expression.

“I don’t even want to be hearing this,” Jimmy muttered into his hands. “Why are we still talking about this?”

“Oh, grow up,” Devi snapped, kicking his lawn chair.

“Hey!” he shrieked, “I’m not the one fixated on it!”

“He  _does_  have a point, Devi,” Tenna said coolly.

Devi wanted to tear her hair out. Instead, she kept packing things into the van.  Tenna tortured Jimmy for the next fifteen minutes, until Johnny and Edgar showed up. Edgar was carrying absolutely everything, and Johnny’s hands were wrapped in some questionable looking fabric.

Devi and Jimmy managed a very lame ‘hi’, but Tenna struggled with just keeping her laughter in, so said nothing at all. Edgar seemed to notice, and bit his lip for a moment.

“Heeelloo,” he said, looking at everyone expectantly. “Is there something wrong?”

“No,” Devi answered quickly. She shook her head a little too emphatically, and Edgar’s clear uncomfortable feeling did not appear to lessen.

“Well, then,” Edgar said, setting all his bags down, “I was wondering if you guys would load this stuff into the van for me.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Jimmy asked.

“Johnny and I are going to run over to the Quik-Mart.”

“Oh,” Tenna said, “gonna get some  _supplies_?”

Jimmy made a face like he was going to cry, and Devi thought she must not be far behind. Edgar had a look of absolute bewilderment on his face, but something close to recognition flashed across Johnny’s and he stepped in front of Edgar, and bowed slightly towards Tenna.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Should we pick something up for you and Devi as well?”

Tenna’s jaw dropped and she managed nothing but pointing wildly at Johnny and Edgar as they walked down the street. Jimmy and Devi stared after them in silence.

For weeks, that day was known as ‘ _That_   _Time Nny Got Tenna_ ,’ or, more frequently, ‘ _That One Time’_ , and even after being explained to an incredibly mortified Edgar, was frequently referenced in conversations that had nothing to do with her, or needing ‘supplies.’

*****

It seemed that the Homicides didn’t hold concerts this time around, they held parties. Stages were lower to the ground, so that the pulsing mob could easily have dragged Johnny under had he gone too close to the edge. He wasn’t sure what was keeping them from climbing up most of the time.

In the spirit of encouragement, Johnny and the others had a few small groups of local kids from every place they played perform some small sets around the Homicides show. This gave the group a chance to mingle and weave their way through the hysterical groups of sweaty teenagers and frighten people on a more personal level. They told people it was to get close to their fans, but even Edgar knew it was just to fuck with their heads.

When the groups of high school students stopped playing, the auditoriums and clubs played recordings of the Homicides over the screaming. Johnny had thought it was odd to hear the songs and not be feeling them run through him at the same time, but appreciated the devotion.

 _“I don't think that it's_  
Gonna rain again today   
There's a devil at your side   
But an angel on her way”

A song the Homicides had sung, but not written, a resurrected song, came over the speakers at one show near the group’s hometown. The tour had gone on a strange pattern this time around and was going to pass through home for a few days in the middle before continuing onward in another direction.

Johnny wandered through the crowds of people, who often shrieked that it really had been him who had just bumped their sister or best friend or cousin or boyfriend. He wasn’t looking for anyone or anything, he just enjoyed the atmosphere of near-panic.

 _“Someone hit the light_  
'Cause there's more here to be seen   
When you caught my eye   
I saw everywhere I'd been  
And wanna go to”

He suddenly felt that he was being stared at.

 _“You came on your own_  
That's how you'll leave   
With hope in your hands   
And air to breathe   
  
I won't disappoint you   
As you fall apart   
Some things should be simple   
Even an end has a start”

This wasn’t the ‘almost-celebrity’ stared at, this wasn’t even a ‘That One Time’ kind of stared at. This was malicious staring. Johnny kept whirling around, looking for the source of it, but with so many people and so much movement, he had a hard time pinning it down. He finally narrowed it down to what he’d thought was an empty corner of the hall. He navigated around fans and people who had just seen him for the first time, but if they said anything to him, he didn’t hear any words. Clearing people out of his way like stray branches, he moved gradually towards the stare.

The woman that he found in the corner never moved toward him, or backed away. She just stared. She wore glasses, and glared at Johnny over the top of the frames.

_“You came on your own  
That's how you'll leave”_

“I-,” Johnny started, “Don’t I know you?”

“Something like that.”

When she spoke, he thought of tracing demented drawings on rotting wood, of the sky and the floor and the air going black. Of realizing he’d been wrong, and finding it funny.

No one noticed her, no one spoke to her, and no one even seemed to acknowledge the corner she stood in. She moved her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, and looked at Johnny a little more directly. She shifted her weight, and the light from a nearby mirror ball caught on a metal ankh on a chain around her neck.

“I  _do_  know you,” Johnny said quietly. Too quietly to be heard in the pulsing room, but the woman nodded.

“I wondered how long it would take.”

Every word made something horrible flash in his head. Something deafening, and bone shattering. Steel and leather crushing his skull later, when it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.  She was like the house, and he couldn’t stay. He backed away from her, and she made no efforts to follow him.

_“You came on your own  
That's how you'll leave”_

“Don’t worry,” she mouthed.   _I’ll see you again._

He backed into Devi, who hadn’t been looking for him. When he finally managed to get her to understand what he was yelling into her ear, the woman in the corner was gone.

“Please, calm down, please,” Edgar told him that night in van, as they pulled out of the parking lot.

“She wasn’t – she didn’t – I don’t think she deserved this.” He alternately tried to attach himself to Edgar’s shoulder, and talk with his hands. He must have looked hysterical.

“Okay,” Edgar said, grabbing one of Johnny’s wrists, “stop flailing, you’re going to hit something and reopen some of those cuts.” The cuts were too small now to be much trouble, even if they could somehow reopen. Johnny felt that Edgar was worried about him, but he knew it wasn’t about cuts.

“I wasn’t going to kill her.”

“Pardon?”

“She just got caught in it. She wasn’t supposed to be there. The guy with her was an asshole. I think I’d be happy to know he was killed a second time.”

Edgar raised an eyebrow and kept hold of Johnny’s wrist.

“She reminds me of dying.” Johnny stared at the back of the chair in front of him, but sank desperately into his own seat. Tenna and the others were in the van, but kept silent.

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

“Really. Things in my head shut down when she talks. Everything goes black.” He looked at Edgar frantically. “Do you know what it’s like when the  _air_  goes black?”

Edgar let go of Johnny’s wrist and pulled him into an awkward hug.

“Don’t worry about it. She’s not going to grow tentacles and chase us home. It was only a matter of time before you recognized someone else from before, right? We’ll just go home and be as completely lazy as we can possibly be, and you’ll feel better.”

Johnny tried to nod, not out of agreement, but just because Edgar sounded like he was really trying to be sensible.  He stayed quiet for the remainder of the ride back home. It would only be a few days, but being somewhere where the woman wasn’t would be nice.

Only when Tenna dropped them off on the sidewalk near their house, and they were left standing in light rain, did Johnny speak again.

“I can’t remember her name,” he said.

After that night, Johnny didn’t think he would enjoy the party concerts quite so much.

 

*****

A few days and some calming down later, Edgar and Johnny decided to have Chinese for breakfast. As soon as Johnny managed to find some place that would actually deliver to two lazy guys who didn’t want to leave the house,  _and_  a place willing to believe that he was who he said he was (“No, there’s nothing after that. It’s just a C. No, really. Yes. Yeah, well, you know what? Fuck you  _and_ your Sweet and Sour Pork.”), he and Edgar had two little white boxes of Lo Mein and a marathon of the Worst Movies in Existence on one of the channels in the 300’s.

Johnny maintained that the epitome of lazy was to eat food in bed in front of the television, and so Edgar ate food in his bed for what he was sure was the first time.

“This is insane,” Johnny said, pointing at the black-and-white monster on the screen with his chopsticks. “You can see this guy’s zipper! How did they miss shit like that back when they made this?”

Edgar dropped some noodles onto the blanket beside him. “Shit, that’s all your fault,” he said, trying to pick up what he’d dropped with little success.

“Me? What the hell did I do? You’re the one who can’t handle chopsticks.”

“See, I thought the idea here was to be lazy. A fork really would have been lazier.”

“Yeah, but the chopsticks make it ironic.”

Somewhere in the middle of the box of Lo Mein, during some commercials, Edgar heard something fuzzy. He thought it was the commercials, so he ignored it for a while, but it continued when the movie returned. He looked off the side of the bed for a CD player that had been left on, but saw nothing but the shirts Johnny had thrown all over his floor in an effort to ‘de-lame’ Edgar’s closet.

“Do you hear something?” Edgar asked when he couldn’t find the source of the noise.

“What?” Johnny looked up from his noodle box, and slurped a few stray noodles into his mouth.

“Nothing, maybe it’s just me.”

Johnny shrugged and continued eating. “Whatever.”

Edgar tried to concentrate on the movie in front of him, but the sound was changing rapidly, and kept demanding his attention.

“What’s that sound?” he asked, when he couldn’t tolerate it anymore.

“I don’t hear anything,” Johnny answered, trying to make a little noodle bridge on his chopsticks.

“Really? It’s some song, or something. I think you left the stereo on.” Edgar looked towards the door to see if he could hear the sound better from the direction of the stereo.

“ _I_  think you’re on crack.”

Edgar leaned over and inspected Johnny’s neck and ear. “Are you wearing headphones or something?”

Johnny leaned away from him, and pulled up his shoulders, irritated. “No! Shut up and eat your Lo Mein.”

Edgar kept looking around. He knew he could hear something, and he knew it was close, he just had no idea where it was coming from. It sounded so odd, like something he wanted to make louder just to make sure he was really hearing what he thought he was.

“I swear,” Edgar muttered almost to himself, “it’s like I’m sitting on it. It’s right here.”

The sound – no, the song – twisted and turned and changed into other things, but still retained something that made Edgar sure it was the same as the first bit he’d heard. The notes were strange in places, but were surprisingly enjoyable all the same.

“What the hell?” Edgar said, frustrated. “You really can’t hear this?”

Johnny dropped his noodles, and made no moves to attempt to recover them.

“What does it sound like?” he asked quietly. He was staring straight ahead, but wasn’t watching the movie.

“It’s just some strange song, and it’s like it’s coming from totally no-” Edgar stopped abruptly when he realized it.

“From nowhere, huh?” Johnny sounded like he was having trouble breathing.

“I can’t tell where it’s coming from.” Edgar slowly set his noodle box on the floor beside his old t-shirts.  Johnny sat in his spot, his shoulders shaking. He picked up an arm and, without turning around to look at him, put his hand over Edgar’s glasses. Edgar closed his eyes.

“Where is it coming from, now?”

Edgar felt his chest tighten and he had to fight to get enough air in a single breath. He reached up slowly and took hold of Johnny’s wrist, moving his hand.

“You,” he breathed.

Johnny finally turned to look at him. He looked terrified, and Edgar felt Johnny’s wrist trembling in his hand. The song was definitely coming from Johnny. It wove itself around all of Edgar’s thoughts, and permeated anything he’d ever imagined. Everything in the fathomable world was saturated with this song, every connection he’d ever made sewn together with these notes, held together with some fragment or another of the melody. To have had something so deeply tied into everything that he was, and not have seen it there until now scared and amazed Edgar.

Johnny tried several times before he formed words that Edgar could hear. 

“What does it sound like?” Johnny whispered.

“I can’t describe-”

“Hum,” Johnny snapped. Edgar jumped at the desperation in his voice. “Please,” Johnny added a moment later.

“I-Isn’t that cheating?”

“Edgar.”

“You told me-”

“Edgar, a long time ago, you sat around every day miserably alone, wondering what the hell you were looking for all day.” Johnny’s voice quivered when he spoke, and as often as Edgar thought he would, he didn’t choke on a single word. “And when you found it, you were desperate for it, and you followed it around until it drove you crazy and finally someone let you in. The damn thing took a hold of you and wouldn’t let you go.”

Edgar felt Johnny’s wrist slide out of his hand, and Johnny moved close to Edgar’s side, nearly sitting in his lap, staring him in the face.

“I’m still the same way,” Johnny continued. “I have been looking for that same thing for longer than you knew what it was.” He closed his fingers around Edgar’s wrist. “You can’t keep it from me. You can’t.”

“But-”

“Then I fucking cheated, Edgar! I don’t care!” His grip on Edgar’s wrist tightened, and Edgar tried to pull away. Johnny yanked his wrist back down against the bed. “Please,” he managed, still trembling.

Edgar rested his free arm on Johnny’s back, and Johnny fell against Edgar’s chest as though he’d just been barely balanced where he sat. Edgar felt him shudder.

“Okay, okay,” Edgar said softly, closing his arms around Johnny. “Just give me a minute, alright? Let me try to get the feel of it.”

Johnny nodded against Edgar’s ribs. Closing his eyes, Edgar tried to focus entirely on the song. Tried to find parts that repeated, something that he could predict. The song was evidently not interested in cooperating, and swirled around him, but never got close enough for him to grab. Things echoed at the back of his head that soothed his breathing, and things happened at the front of the song that tried to stab him. There were layers and elements to this song that Edgar couldn’t hope to replicate by humming. It was sharp and violent but flowing and enchanting at the same time. Edgar thought he could get lost in it for days.

Finally, one underlying tune found him, and he followed it until he was comfortable with where it went, and started to hum along. He felt Johnny take a sharp breath and hold it in. Rather than ruin it for him by asking Johnny if he was alright, Edgar kept humming, trying his best to incorporate the other layers. If Johnny wanted to pass out while hearing his own song, that was fucking okay. Edgar started, almost entirely without thinking about it, ‘playing’ the appropriate notes to the other elements on the song along Johnny’s spine.

He felt the weight on his chest lift, and Johnny sat back up. He put his hands gently over Edgar’s ears and looked his face over like he’d never seen it before, or he wasn’t going to see it again for a long time and needed desperately to remember.

“I would give anything to be in your skin right now.” Johnny’s voice had stabilized, and it seemed his breathing was improving.

“If that wouldn’t involve one of us being severely disfigured, I’d let you.”

Johnny laughed and let himself fall back against Edgar. He let out a long breath and everything normalized. No one was having trouble getting air, and no one was in pain from desperation. Edgar tightened his arms around Johnny and hummed lightly. For the first time, he felt things the way Johnny often described them, not as tactile things through his skin, but as perceptions. Felt that Johnny was remarkably content, if not quite happy.

_Made him happy._

“I could probably die happy now,” Johnny said, laughing softly.

Edgar went to make a remark, something witty or sarcastic, perhaps, but did not get the opportunity. Johnny suddenly grabbed onto Edgar’s shirt with such force that he thought Johnny was trying to choke him. Edgar jumped, alarmed, and Johnny let go, only to claw wildly at him, while making noises that sounded something like gasps.

“Nny? What’s wrong? Is it the noodles?”

Johnny didn’t say anything, but his expression reflected absolute terror, and his eyes refused to focus on anything. His mouth moved, but no sound came out. Edgar started to panic, and tried to shake sense into him. Johnny was easily moved, his head snapping back and forth when Edgar shook him. Edgar yelled Johnny’s name, but Johnny neither responded nor seemed to notice. Johnny suddenly arched his back, his eyes went wide, a tiny, strangled noise escaped his throat and he fell back limply against Edgar’s arms.

And as it faded away, Edgar realized that Johnny’s song had had no words.

_Never Been Hot Enough._

_She’s Got Technicolor Shoes._

_Work In Progress._

_If Happiness._

And as Edgar sat there screaming at the dead man in his arms, the last tendril of the wordless song slipped from his mind as easily as Johnny had always ducked out of Edgar’s embraces.  Johnny would have been so disappointed to find out that there had been no words, no chorus, no identifying phrase.

_Song Without A Name._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editors - An End Has a Start


	20. Song Without A Name (Twentilogue)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As it has always been planned, the last song is VAST’s ‘Song Without A Name,’ though it sounds absolutely nothing like Johnny’s. It has words, after all.  
> Any other lyrics, as you’ve hopefully noticed, are the words for all the other songs I’ve ever featured here (those that had words, anyhow).

Devi felt it before Tenna did.

Jimmy felt it before Devi did.

It was only a few blocks to Edgar’s house, and they’d never considered it before, but there was no discussion at all about taking the van. Tenna didn’t even fully park before Devi and Jimmy frantically clawed out of their seats and stumbled across the sidewalk to Edgar’s door.

Devi didn’t think Tenna even closed the van’s doors, she appeared behind Devi so quickly. Jimmy threw the door open and scaled the staircase on all fours. Devi tried to run after him and tripped over her own boots on the first step. There was a pile of shattered ceramic bits near her leg, covered in dried blood. On the wall above them, an old bloody stain in the shape of a smiley face with ‘look edgar, no palms!’ scrawled beneath it. Devi got back to her feet and followed Jimmy up the stairs.

For a moment, she wondered how Jimmy knew where to go. Then she realized he was following the sobbing. Devi dreaded nearing the room and could not get there fast enough at the same time.

 _“and what will happen_   _will I dream?_  
 _I am too scared to close my eyes”_

She and Jimmy leaned into the doorway and saw Edgar’s back, hunched over and trembling, along with one of Johnny’s legs dangling over the side of the bed. As they drew closer, half-afraid, Johnny’s hand, lying open on the blanket in front of Edgar, came into view.

Jimmy had been “ohgodnononono”-ing since they’d left but only when Devi heard her voice echo his did she really notice it. Tenna stood behind her, biting her lip and trying not to let her keychain collection make any noise.

Edgar slowly looked up at them, his eyes swollen and his face both confirming what they’d all felt and begging them to tell him he was wrong.

“What did you do?!” Jimmy’s voice threatened to collapse in on itself.

“Nothing!” Edgar choked into a scream.

“What did you do to him?!” Jimmy lunged towards the lifeless Johnny, and Edgar pulled back away from him, clutching Johnny to his chest.

“Why the hell would I hurt him?!”

“Dear God, no,” Devi heard Tenna mutter behind her, as though everything had just hit her. Edgar and Jimmy screamed incoherently at each other, and Devi thought she smelled Lo Mein.

“Dear God,” Tenna said again.

“He’s not the one you should be concerned with.”

The man that had given Johnny his keys appeared in the far corner of the room. Devi hadn’t seen him in years, and he was so much more bizarre looking than she remembered.

“You,” Edgar said, his voice trembling.

“Me, indeed,” Pepito said with a slight bow. “I tried to warn you guys. I really did.” He smiled sweetly at Edgar, and shifted a few of the locks around his neck. When he finished the motion, Johnny’s body simply vanished.

Edgar made a smothered noise and grasped dumbly at the nothing in his arms. Jimmy tried to attack Pepito, but the discarded T-shirts that were strewn around the room wrapped around the soles of his boots, and he didn’t get the advantage of surprise. Pepito let him get within arm’s length before vanishing the way Johnny had.

Jimmy began swearing and screaming at the wall, pounding on any surface that wasn’t covered with pictures or posters. Devi felt Tenna’s arm against hers.

“Get out,” Edgar whispered.

“Huh?”

“GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT!” he screamed at Devi and Tenna who were just unfortunately closer, but the outburst was obviously meant for Jimmy, too. Devi took a step back, and Edgar took a step off the bed in response. She nodded hastily and beckoned to Jimmy, who left the room backwards, staring knives into Edgar.

  
*****

The world was darker than it had ever been. Johnny’s song had tangled its way into everything that Edgar was, everything he could imagine, everything he remembered and everything he thought was real and tangible. When Johnny died, the song retreated and left black trenches through everything it had touched.

 _Yes, Johnny_ , Edgar thought,  _I_ ** _do_** _know what it’s like when even the air turns black._

The worst pain he could ever imagine. The worst he could remember.   
  
Pepito had been right.

  
 _“drown out the machinery in my head”_

  
After he'd chased everyone out, Edgar stayed on his bed, screaming, sobbing, cursing, and writhing among the blankets. Everything smelled of Lo Mein, and a pathetic excuse for a monster attacked a woman on the television. He couldn't move the noodles, couldn't change the channel, couldn't get off the bed.   
  
The last thing Johnny had touched, the last thing he'd watched, the last place he'd been.  
  
Edgar felt a stabbing pain in his lungs when he realized the last song that Johnny had ever heard had been his own, but in Edgar's poor, lacking rendition.  
  
Said he could die happy.  
  
But he'd died in pain, flailing desperately and clawing at life, with absolutely nothing that Edgar could have done to help. There was no way Johnny could have choked on the noodles - he'd taken his last bite of them well before he took that vicious grip on Edgar's shirt. Edgar wanted to know what happened, needed to know, but was paralyzed with agony. He wanted to find Pepito and run him through with the knives in the kitchen and just curl up and sleep until he woke up and everything was fine again.   
  
He tried to stand, but the room seemed to just swirl around him. Everything taunted him and everything was Johnny. The shirts Johnny had thrown on the floor, the pictures Johnny had hung upside down or made scary black marker additions to, the little knick knacks that they'd collected from yard sales over the summers that Johnny had arranged into having a giant war across the top of the dresser. Broken ceramic baby heads versus the fanciful unicorns had never failed to make Edgar laugh until now.  
  
Edgar stumbled down the stairs, trying not to look at the pictures that hung along them. The bottom stair was still scattered with the ceramic mask thing that Johnny had shattered into his hands. Johnny's blood still on the wall. The smile and stupid message Johnny had traced with his fingers still in smeared dried brown across the wallpaper. Edgar grabbed his keys from the desk in the dining room, trying not to look at anything, and managed to make it to the door.   
  
He locked it behind him.

_“Got to_ _  
_Save you from all of your_  
 _Demons that had to score_  
 _Every trick that you’ve pulled before_  
 _Here it comes again”_ _

  
The blocks to Pepito's house looked strange. Children playing in parking lots were screaming and laughing. Teenage couples sat on porches, and people said things like 'please' and 'thank you' to each other. Cars stayed in their lanes and didn't run over random passersby. Everything mocking him.   
  
When he rounded the corner to near the school, he stopped cold.   
  
Nothing.   
  
Absolutely nothing there. Pepito's house wasn't just gone, there was not so much as an old foundation or a stay bit of brick - just a giant hole of black that Edgar couldn't see the bottom of. The school appeared untouched, as did the houses nearby.   
  
"Horrible, isn't it?" Edgar jumped at the voice, and turned to see the Trenchcoat Guy standing beside him.   
  
"Wha...?"  
  
Dib. That had been Trenchcoat's name, right?   
  
"It just disappeared this morning," Dib said. "I came to check on the readings, and there was nothing to check. Like the ground just sucked them in."  
  
"Like Hell."  
  
"I know, I know. It  _sounds_  ridiculous, but I'm willing to believe that we may have a-"  
  
"Like Hell sucked them in," Edgar interrupted.  
  
Dib looked like he wanted to refute that, or deliver some scientific reason as to why that was impossible, but said nothing about it. He looked Edgar up and down thoughtfully.  
  
"What are you doing out here like that?” he asked, regarding Edgar's flannel pants and old T-shirt.  
  
Edgar raised a hand to shove Dib into the black pit in front of them, to crack him in the back of the skull with his keys and send him spiraling to Hell the same way he wanted to do to the children he could still hear laughing, but was overcome with hatred for Pepito and a stabbing pain in his chest instead. He screamed something into the hole, though he didn't know what. Dib backed away from him, and knelt down to pick up some monitors he'd placed in Pepito's yard, keeping his eyes on Edgar as he moved.   
  
Dib made some noise, like perhaps he'd discovered something important, but Edgar had already tuned him out, and was on his way to ... somewhere. He didn't know what he was doing, or where he was going, but everything in him was screaming, and if he stayed there too long, he'd throw himself in the hole without a second thought, and take Trenchcoat Guy with him.

He ended up back at home, though he hadn’t wanted to. Threw himself into the door only to remember he had locked it for the first time in years. He fumbled with the lock and collapsed into the small entry way in front of the stairs. The presence of Johnny in everything around him was even stronger from the floor. He couldn’t stand, couldn’t look at the things around him, so he crawled his way up the steps, partly sobbing, and partly cursing Pepito and Trenchcoat Guy.

  
*****  
  
 _"when I close my eyes_ _  
 _it looks the same_  
 _as when I open them again"__

  
Johnny saw black, and black. He blinked, and it was still black. He was lying on his back against something hard, something like porous stone. He sat up, and felt the ground around him. No walls or barriers. No definable features.   
  
Something brushed his jaw. His hand shot up to swat the bug, or grab the hand, but he found neither. Instead, he touched leather. A high collared leather coat.   
All clothes he didn't recognize the feel of. Stiff new boots, and a shirt that wasn't falling apart at the seams. Fingerless gloves on his hands. He was still wearing Hell's key around his neck on the old worn ribbon, but that was all that felt familiar. The back of his head even felt freshly shaved.  
  
He tried to call out into the dark, but no sounds came out. His throat felt dry and stiff. Held a hand above his head and stood up slowly. Neither his head nor his hand hit any kind of ceiling.   
  
 _If I just had some matches,_  he thought.   
  
"You can do better than that," someone said. The voice echoed enough to give Johnny the idea that he was in something very large and very empty. Johnny felt something in his hand, and upon examining it with ungloved fingers, discovered it was a match book. He struggled with the matches, but even when he finally managed to get one lit, he saw nothing but black. Light reflected off of his coat and the buckles on his boots, but there was no sign of anything else in the space but him.   
  
 _Okay. I have a flame thrower._  
  
"No you don't," the voice answered.  
  
 _A gas tank._  
  
"Come on, now."  
  
 _A fucking flashlight,_  he thought angrily.  
  
The weight of the flashlight in his hand startled him. He expected to have to will batteries into existence too, but the light came on when Johnny's thumb hit the switch. The light traveled beyond where the matches could reach, and some of the texture of what he was now sure was some kind of lava rock came into view. He dropped the matchbook to the floor to mark his spot, and moved forward.  
  
"This is still a little sad."  
  
 _You wouldn't give me a flame thrower, Pepito._  
  
Pepito appeared in front of him.   
  
"I'd hoped to keep that up longer," he said. Johnny shined the flashlight in his eyes. "Hey, hey, easy!"  
  
 _What is this? What have you done to me?_  Johnny refused to move the light from Pepito's eyes. Pepito stood unmoving, speaking with his eyes closed.  
  
"I did absolutely nothing. Your boy did everything himself."  
  
 _Edgar is not m-! Edgar. Where is he? What did you do to him?_  
  
"Would you like to see him?"  
  
 _Of course I would!_  
  
"Are you suuuure?" Pepito's tone should have tipped Johnny off, but he wasn't feeling as inclined to care about his perceptions as usual.  
  
 _Yes!_  
  
"Good," Pepito grinned. He snapped his fingers and Johnny saw the walls light up. Three walls. Three screens.   
  
Devi on one.  
  
Jimmy on the other.  
  
Edgar on the last.  
  
All of them seemingly going insane.   
  
 _What the fuck?_  
  
"Welcome home," Pepito said sweetly. "I thought you'd appreciate seeing your friends deal with your death for a while. Let me know if there's anything I can do to make your stay here more enjoyable. If this becomes a little much for you, direct your attention to the floor, and take in the sights of Hell. I hear there's going to be a giant car accident today."  
  
He vanished before Johnny could swear in his head at him.   
  
Dead. It made more sense, at least.  
  
The wall to his right showed Devi sitting with Tenna in her apartment, wrapped in a blanket and crying into a pillow in her lap. Tenna kept offering her hot chocolate and soup, and Devi alternated between sobbing and screaming 'FUCK' in response.  
  
The wall behind him was Jimmy, who was tearing up everything he owned. He pulled whole chunks of drywall down and flung them to the floor, smashed figurines and plates and electronic equipment, even starting shredding his German dictionary. He was screaming some interesting combinations of words that Johnny felt almost flattered to have inspired.   
  
Edgar's wall on Johnny's left. Johnny had been trying not to look.   
  
It showed Edgar, sitting on a step, leaning against the wall alongside the stairs. His whole body heaved with every sob, and Johnny thought he might fall down the steps with the force of them. Edgar looked up occasionally, but it seemed everything he looked at made him even more upset. Johnny watched him crawl up the stairs and curl into a ball on his bed before he didn't want to see anymore.   
  
The floor still felt like stone, and looked like stone, but was transparent. Johnny was suspended in something over the very center of hell. He found if he concentrated on one person, he could hear them speaking, and the things around them. He watched people moving around, going about daily things, and then screaming in agony over some tiny detail. Large portions of everything below him were completely devoid of 'life,' as though they just kept building the city to appease children who didn't want play with the old bits anymore.  
  
Pepito had been right - there was a giant car accident today. Something was odd about the smoke.  
  
Johnny thought while he stared at the people working below him. He tried to imagine how he would get out, how he could calm everyone if he could, how he could stab Pepito in the throat with his key.   
  
Tried to speak, but still nothing came.

Johnny sat for hours. His friends screamed and cried around him, and the citizens of Hell wailed beneath him. He kept waiting for something to change, and nothing ever did.

Edgar’s wall made him a little ill – there was no change in it, ever. Devi was eventually able to fall asleep and wake up puffy-eyed and hungry but no longer hysterical. Once Jimmy had torn everything he had apart, he’d swallowed some little white tablets and slept for hours, then wandered blindly through the streets until he stopped threatening people. Edgar, however, never stopped sobbing. Day and night there was nothing but the sound of Edgar’s endless mourning.

The others tried to visit Edgar, and Johnny saw all their screens reflect the same scenes. Edgar screamed at them and refused to see them for weeks. When he finally felt up to letting the others in, Johnny had been dead for nearly a month. The time didn’t pass that way for Johnny himself, but he knew the duration regardless.

When the door to Edgar’s house opened, Devi launched into hugging Edgar and clung onto him for several minutes. Jimmy made very few movements at first, but then offered Edgar his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when Edgar hesitantly took it. “I know it wasn’t your fault.”

Devi quietly asked Edgar if they could talk. She and Jimmy needed to hear whatever he knew about Johnny’s death, she said, because the media wasn’t buying the ‘sudden heart failure’ story she and Jimmy had fed them. She looked a little anxious, but without being right there, Johnny couldn’t tell for sure.

Edgar had everyone sit down and did his best to recount what had happened.

“So it ended up being you. You heard it,” Devi said softly when Edgar mentioned Johnny’s song.

“Yeah.”

“What was it like?”

Edgar was silent for several seconds. Johnny hated that he couldn’t feel whether or not an answer was coming.

“ _Incredible_ ,” Edgar finally answered.

Johnny winced.

A week later, Jimmy, Devi, and Tenna had a sort of service for Johnny. It seemed odd to him that they’d bother when none of them had ever had any kind of religion. He felt bad that they did things like this, and felt bad that they were suffering, but had to feel a little triumphant at being able to witness his own funeral.

_“I find it kind of funny_  
 _I find it kind of sad”_

People he didn’t know were there. Little kids and a throng of teenagers, plus a large number of college kids showed up to hear what Jimmy and Devi had to say. Dib the Trenchcoat Guy had even made an appearance. The only person who wasn’t there was Edgar.

Edgar was still locked in his house, sitting on the pink recliner, with a pile of newspapers and letters around him.

“I’m sorry,” he said to a picture of Johnny that had been enclosed in one of the letters. “I can’t go. I know people will want to hear from me, but I just can’t do it.” He sighed and shuffled through a few more layers of newspaper until he came across another shot of Johnny.  “I can’t decide if you’d be angry at me for not going to your funeral or if you would tell me to fuck using my own pain to ease others’. You can only know a person so well, I guess.”

“Fuck them, Edgar,” Johnny said to the wall. His voice worked now.

Johnny turned to Devi’s wall where she was explaining why Edgar hadn’t shown up.

“He doesn’t talk to us much since it happened,” she explained to the group who had gathered in front of her. “I imagine he must be feeling at least double what we are. I’m sorry he’s not here, but I don’t think he’d have appreciated the questions anyway.”

“We still don’t have any more concrete information about what happened to Johnny,” Devi continued later. “Heart failure is the best we have still, I’m sorry.” She tried to laugh. “If we lived in any other world, you’d all be asking me where the body was, and how can I say he’s dead with no proof, but you can all tell his song is gone without ever having heard it just like I can. I always heard stories of people who felt it the moment their loved ones songs had clicked off, but I never thought I’d experience it, let alone with a song I couldn’t hear.”

Johnny had always imagined he’d feel better about hearing a bunch of strangers singing his praises. Instead, he just felt bad about Edgar. Edgar, who had been the only one who did hear the song disappear.

There was no way out of the space he was in. He searched for a crack or a seam or a trapdoor of some type for days, but there was nothing. Despite this, after a considerable amount of time, people started appearing in front of him, looking lost and panicked.

“What are you doing here?!” he’d yelled at the first one. He’d been expecting some sort of answer, some sort of ‘I crawled in from this very obvious heating vent’ explanation that would lead to him and the spineless loser in front of him escaping into the black and perhaps digging their way to life again.  
Instead, he got a confession.

  
 _“Back in the beginning to lift the mental fog_  
 _Each and every person created their own god”_

  
“I never meant to hurt her!” the person, who he assumed had been a man once, shrieked at him. “I didn’t mean it! She just asked for it! Why do they always ask for it?!”

Johnny backed up, alarmed. The man continued.

“I can change! She’d just have to think for once! It’s not my fault!" Johnny watched the man twitch in front of him. He looked nervously around him, and avoided looking at Johnny entirely.

“You’re disgusting,” Johnny told him. The man’s entire body seemed to flinch.

“No! No! No!” he screamed. He took a step toward Johnny and Johnny took one back from him, grabbing the key at his neck. When his fingers closed around it, the floor below the screaming man opened up, and he crashed through one of the skyscrapers in the scene below.

An hour later, another soul appeared.  Johnny was friendly at first, and the person was rather receptive to him as well. Only when Johnny echoed his question to the first man did the person in front of him get hysterical and try to run from him.  Johnny clutched the key and watched them disappear.

“What are you doing here?” All it took.

The answers were always excuses and pleadings as to why they didn’t belong in Hell, but every response damned them. As much as he hated the suffering of the people on the walls around him, he delighted in sending these ‘people’ through the floor. They came in a regular stream, but not nearly as often as Johnny imagined people who deserved Hell were dying. For some reason, he wasn’t getting all of them.

Anytime Johnny enjoyed giving some mass of filth what they deserved, he’d hear Edgar talking idly to him though some photograph, or to the empty half of his bed, or even to the little bloody smiley face on the wall and he’d go back to aching over the pain Edgar was experiencing and feeling burning rage for Pepito.

  
 _“I was born to stare_  
 _at who stares back at me”_

  
Maybe they’d be doing this forever. As often as Johnny screamed in frustration at Edgar’s wall for Edgar to wake up, or to go outside, or to do something other than sob, Johnny really wasn’t the type to want to be forgotten or gotten over.  He just wished Edgar would heal.

Over time, Devi’s wall faded out. She’d healed enough with Tenna to be there with her that her mourning was no longer going to torment Johnny, and he assumed Pepito had it turned off. The same happened with Jimmy, or maybe it was more pronounced. His lust turned hero-worship turned lusting-after-hero became something closer to improving himself, and in the last scene Johnny saw of him before the wall faded he closed the door on his still decimated apartment, guitar in one hand, pages of a German dictionary in the other.

Edgar just wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t let things gloss over. Johnny grew concerned that maybe it was because he didn’t really want him to. He knew it was selfish, and could see how wrong it was looking at Edgar, but he still didn’t want Edgar going about life like nothing was missing.   
  
He just didn’t want Edgar to go about life like  _everything_  was missing.

  
*****

Edgar stopped caring about anything. He was occasionally dragged out to make some appearance and refute accusations of murder, but he was rarely in a state to be seen by other people. He spent most of his time talking to photos of Johnny or the empty places where Johnny should have been.

“I don’t understand what went wrong,” he told the cushion on the couch one day. “I looked for what must have been years, finally found you, finally got close to you, found what I wanted, thought I gave you something you wanted and … and I just lost you again.” He buried his face in a pillow.  “How many times do we have to do this?”

“Did me hearing your song kill you?” he asked of the empty side of his bed another day. “What made it show up then? It’s all I want to hear and all I hear is…”  
He hummed his own song and choked on the chorus.

“‘ _Immortal until I find happy_ ,’” he quoted mockingly. “Then I hope someone breaks in here with a gun and lets me follow you.”

Weeks later, Edgar was analyzing everything, and starting to make himself feel as responsible as Jimmy had thought he was when it first happened.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asked the ceiling. “Maybe when he imagined himself with me, he had something else in mind. I failed at some aspect of being his and those guys who gave me the book took him from me. Wasn’t close enough to him. Was too close. It was too deep or too much or too blasphemous or…”

He’d checked the book then, but ‘Johnny C’ was no where to be found in the listings of items in the house.

  
 _“We can supply anything_ _  
_that your heart desires_  
 _but the consequences_  
 _will surely be dire”_ _

  
“And maybe I loved him too intensely?” he said, glaring at the book. “You can’t accuse me of too little, you can’t. There’s nothing in me  _but_  what I felt for him.”

Edgar dreamed that it was a game. Dreamed that Pepito would bring Johnny back relatively unharmed, save for maybe a scar or two, and everything would be perfect. Edgar would have Johnny back and they’d be happy, and they’d lie around tangled in each other and Johnny would joke about the shape of the scar above his eye.

“Look at this,” Johnny would say gleefully, “I could be some kind of magical prince guy now. I’ve got  _the mark_. Someone market me! I’m the ruler of a lost civilization! I’m the chosen one! Write books about me!”

And for some reason, this would be irresistible to Edgar and he’d just melt against Johnny and right into the cushions or the sheets or the dining room table or wherever his brain took them. And there would be jokes and passion and probably a bloody shoulder torn by fingernails in the midst of amazing things.

And Edgar would wake up, and find nothing beside him – nothing but empty and the smell of Lo Mein, no matter how often he washed the sheets. The smell made him want to vomit, but there was so little in him that his body just shuddered and heaved until Edgar either caved into exhaustion or got himself a sandwich.

And then he’d throw up the sandwich.

  
“ _this chaos is killing me”_

Devi called him on occasion, trying to keep him within the boundaries of sane. On one such occasion, she asked if she could see him.

“Out somewhere,” she replied when he asked where she wanted to meet. “Just to get some fresh air, maybe.” Edgar agreed half-heartedly. He rarely wanted to leave the house, but knew somewhere deep down that it probably wasn’t healthy for him.

They met in front of the library, which was just a block from the school. The school and anything related to it was still pretty painful for all of them, so they avoided it in favor of reasonably nearby landmarks. Devi sat outside on the railing, her hands deep in the pockets of her long coat.  She stood up when she saw Edgar, and smiled as warmly as Edgar imagined she was able.

“It’s good to see you outside,” she said.

“I think it’s good to  _be_  outside, but I’m not sure.”

She laughed quietly and then led Edgar to the steps and invited him to sit down.

“I don’t exactly know what to say about these,” she started, fishing into one of her pockets and pulling out a fat envelope, “but, I thought maybe you’d need them.”

“Devi, if it’s more letters or newspaper clippings, I don’t thin-”

“No, no, it’s not that. I’ve had these since before he… well, since before.” She opened the envelope and Edgar saw the sheen of photographs. He bit his lip.   
“Just hear me out, okay?” Devi said, pulling the stack out. She flipped through several of the top photos, which looked to be just pictures of her apartment and Tenna doing stupid things with a plunger.

“Sorry about those,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “I just needed to finish the roll.”

Edgar shook his head and watched Devi continue examining the photos. When it appeared that she found what she wanted, she tilted them away from Edgar’s view.

“So, I took these the week before everything happened,” she explained. “They’re nice, and they’re fun, you know? They sort of hurt to look at, but they’re nice.” She handed Edgar a trio of photos featuring himself along with Jimmy, Johnny and Tenna. They were all posing dramatically for the camera with dumb props they’d found in the auditorium they were going to play in that night. Johnny had found a gigantic feather boa and was doing his best ‘serious old man face' to go with it.  She handed him several more, lots that were just generic smiling for the camera, but some that were candid shots. One of Johnny and Tenna laughing was particularly enjoyable.

Edgar started to say something, but Devi cut him off.

“So they’re all like that, you know? The pictures you have of him. He’s posing for some picture, or looking crazy for some camera.” Devi looked a little nervous, and kept glancing at the next photo that she wouldn’t let Edgar see.

“I guess they are,” Edgar said. “I don’t really … analyze them.”

“I thought maybe you’d want one that was a little different,” Devi said softly, handing Edgar a single photo.

The photo was dark, like Devi had forgotten the flash, but he and Johnny were still visible at the verge of a kiss in the back of the van. He remembered the moment exactly, but had never known there was a picture.

“I didn’t really plan on it,” Devi explained hurriedly when Edgar sent her a confused look. “I just looked back, and, really, I thought it would make good blackmail later. I thought he wouldn’t want to be seen like that by the legions of screaming fans, and maybe I could get him to buy me tea for a month or something… So I’m sorry, I mean, for taking it without you guys knowing.”

“It’s…”

“But I thought maybe you’d need a picture that wasn’t strictly Homicides Johnny, and was maybe just Johnny Who Loved Edgar.”

The picture made Edgar’s insides clench, and he found his breath had to be forced into his lungs.

“Thank you,” he managed.

“You’re welcome. I think I’m just glad you’re not mad at me.”

“I don’t think I could be.”

  
 _“I will hear my heartbeat_  
 _over the thunder”_

  
“We never know with you anymore, but it’s a real relief to finally give it to you. I’m sorry it took as long as it did.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

When Edgar returned home, he tucked the picture under a pillow on his bed. He still spoke mostly to the images of Johnny looking right at the camera, but when he didn’t feel like talking, even to nothing, the picture was almost comforting. Sometimes, he dreamed that he could restart life from the moment captured in it, and he’d live for years after it with a very alive Johnny, who did indeed have to buy Devi tea for a month every so often to keep the picture within her possession.

  
*****

Pepito made an appearance weeks later. Johnny had grown accustomed to sending everyone who materialized before him down the chute to a long and unhappy afterlife, and was fully prepared to try it on Pepito, but he proved immune to whatever effect the key had on the damned.

“Sorry, it doesn’t work that way,” Pepito said, strolling casually in Johnny’s direction. “You’ll be glad to know it doesn’t work on you either, though,” he added.

“What do you want?” Johnny asked, letting go of the key.

“To see how you’re doing, and see if you’re ready for the rest of them. I’ll get to abandon everything down here soon with the progress you’re making.”  
Johnny almost growled at him.

“So this one is the only one left, hmm?” Pepito said, looking fondly at Edgar’s image on the wall. “I thought he would be.”

“I can’t stand you.”

“You and most of the human race, yes.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“And you don’t want to even ask me why you’re here.”

“Do I need to ask?”

“I think you’ll be surprised,” Pepito said, smiling. He conjured something in the air with a key dangling from his wrist. Johnny squinted at it and recognized an unhealthy looking version of himself lying on nothing but white, with what looked like tin foil in the background.

Johnny watched, intrigued. A likewise less-healthy looking Edgar appeared and seemed horrified to see the other Johnny lying on the not-ground. Edgar spoke to something Johnny couldn’t see, and Pepito waved his hand. The picture sped up, and then Pepito clenched a fist and it resumed normal time.

“ _Let me go and try to make him happy_ ,” portal Edgar said.

Pepito grinned, showing teeth that were closer to being fangs.

Johnny shook his head. “I don’t, I don’t see.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, pausing the little show entirely to go back to the wall showing current Edgar. He motioned for Johnny to look with him, and as much as Johnny was not inclined to do so, he wasn’t going to let Pepito fuck with him or see any kind of weakness, so he followed and stood near the wall.

“Tell me,” Pepito said, looking fondly at the image of Edgar sobbing to himself, “when did you decide to ignore me entirely?”

“When you stopped making any fucking sense, and when Edgar was more important than you.”

“I kept trying to warn you.  It looked awfully familiar, the way he looked at you. I thought it could only get worse, and,” he paused, smiling at the image of Edgar, “could only end in tears.”

Johnny folded his arms over his chest, and rubbed his arms. He felt cold, and he felt the tendrils of something he thought he was going to regret. As much as the dead could regret. That was what made people haunt, wasn’t it?

“I would rather have had you live out your life, really,” Pepito continued when Johnny didn’t reply. “You were coming here no matter what happened, so it would have been nice for you to do whatever you wanted for as long as you could. You wouldn’t have left all those people distraught over their favorite band, at least.” As he spoke, he and Johnny watched Edgar turn on the television and look more and more devastated with every channel. Johnny didn’t have to see the screen to know his picture was on each one.

“As it was, though, you and Edgar here decided to end your life early.”

“Just fucking tell me whatever mystical bullshit you have in mind, I’m tired of your voice.”

“Did you like him, Johnny?”

“Yes, of course I did.” He looked away from the Edgar scene, wave of anger creeping over him.

“And he made you happy?”

“You’re sick.”

“Answer the question.”

“Yes. Yes he did,” Johnny answered grudgingly.

“So there you go.”

“The fuck?”

“You didn’t listen did you?” Pepito poked the frozen image of Johnny and Edgar between lives.

“ _Let me go and try to make him happy_ ,” Pre-Edgar said again.

Johnny actually felt his face drop when it clicked.

“It was decided from then,” Pepito said, still smiling. “You’d been slated to die the moment Edgar made you happiest from day one. I was trying to spare him the pain of having you die when I told you not to get so close.”

For the first time in his li- no, that wasn’t totally accurate anymore, but still - Johnny  _wanted_  to be sick, actually wanted to throw up. Fortunately, he really didn’t have a body to vomit anything from, and so thankfully showed no sign to Pepito, but the feeling was still there.

“And you knew,” Johnny said.

“Of course I knew,” Pepito said. “They asked me if I wouldn’t mind giving you up for another lifetime to see how Edgar dealt with you.”

“You did this.”

“Yes, I did.”

“How can you do this to people?”

Pepito posed. “I’m the son of Satan.”

“And I even said- God, I hate you.” Johnny kept shaking his head, wondering if the tears he felt coming ever would, and hoping they wouldn’t.

“Ha, you’re right, you did. ‘ _I could probably die happy now_.’ How quaint.”

Johnny looked up and at Pepito. Fuck this.

  
 _“You supply the rumors_ _  
_And I'll provide the wrath”_ _

  
“So, how’s Squee?”

Pepito looked a little thrown by the quick change of topic, but answered.

“He’s fine. Holding up the fort while I’m gone.”

“And how long will that be for?” Johnny asked, looking into the image of Edgar suffering.

“As long as it needs to be. He’s good at waiting.”

“You do this to him often?”

Pepito tapped his foot. “What are you getting at?”

“Nothing,” Johnny said. “So no chance you can send me back there, huh?”

“No.”

“Can I haunt people?”

“Only people who’ve done you wrong.”

“Really?” Johnny asked, trying not sound as interested as he was. “What about their family members?”

“If they live in the same house, I think, is the rule. Have someone you need to vent on?”

“I think I might. I used to know a guy who was pretty terrified of everything, and for good reason. He’s practically married to someone who had done me a rather large amount of wrong.” Johnny smiled, touching the image of Edgar in front of him. “I think I’d like to visit him.”

“Sounds like you’ll enjoy yourself.”

“Can I hurt them?” Johnny asked.

“Sure, if that’s what you want to do,” Pepito said cheerfully. “You can’t interact with them, though. You’d need to throw things or drop stuff. Only inanimate objects.”

“Does something happen if I touch them? The person, I mean.”

“No, that’s just it. You can’t do any sort of haunting unless they feel like you’re there, so you’ve got to use…,” Pepito looked around, as though he thought the airless environment would produce the word he wanted.  “…props.”

“Sounds great,” Johnny said. “I think I’ll just be on my way, then.”

Pepito folded his arms in front of his chest and smiled. “You adjust well,” he said.

“Sometimes, you need to learn to do these things,” Johnny said, eyeing the lock hanging from Pepito’s neck. “Adjust well, I mean.”

Johnny felt Pepito grow a little wary, for just a moment.

“Where are you…?” Pepito began.

“I’m going to see Squee,” Johnny said. “I can’t think of anyone who has wronged me more than his other half. Shall I tell him you sent me?” With that, Johnny actually felt himself vanish.

  
 _“Augen Auf, ich komme!”_

  
He readjusted in the kitchen of Pepito’s house. He felt like he had stood up too fast, but otherwise didn’t feel particularly odd. Not dead, anyway. The will to haunt was apparently all he’d needed to get out of his cave for a while. He reached out to take one of the many boxes on the table. He could still touch things. He crunched a roll of crackers in his hand, and glanced around for something sharp. It wasn’t going to take long for Pepito to follow him, so he needed to get this done as quickly as possible.

Johnny found a knife that was being used to cut a plate-sized cookie, and regarded it for a moment. At least he’d lived a whole life without killing someone. And he was definitely part of Hell, now, so this was either going to work in his favor, or do utterly nothing.

He found Squee, or maybe Todd was more appropriate, given the circumstances, playing a game by himself in the other room. The game was still on the mode designed for two players, and Todd sat, bored, talking to the other side of the screen half-heartedly.

“You need to stop hiding there, Pepito,” he said sadly as he shot the character on the left side of the screen. “I’m going to find you every time at this rate.”

Johnny actually wanted this to work. Either way, really. He tossed the knife once, and caught the handle as it came back down to get Todd’s attention.

“Gaaaah!” Todd stood up, and dropped his controller. He didn’t run, which was going to make this much easier. “Pepito?” he asked, looking around. “Pepito, that’s really not- You could have just said you were back!”

Johnny moved forward as fast as he could while still not impaling Todd. He didn’t quite want to do that, at least not yet. Todd scrambled onto a couch against the far wall, and stood against the wall, nearly climbing onto the back of the couch. He felt around the wall behind him desperately. For something to shield himself with, Johnny figured.

Johnny himself hopped onto the couch, standing in front of Todd, knife gently against his neck. Johnny thought he’d have a serious issue with personal space here were he not dead.

“I don’t know if you can hear me,” Johnny said to Todd, applying some pressure, “but I feel bad that this has to be you of all people. Unfortunately,” he said, pressing ever slightly more, “this is the only way to get to him.”

Todd mouthed Johnny’s name.

“And you knew, too. Maybe I don’t feel bad about this after all.”

  
 _“use your evil_  
 _when you want”_

Todd made some flailing motion across the wall, and tried to speak.

“Let him go.” Pepito’s voice filled the room before he appeared behind Johnny.

“No, I don’t think I will,” Johnny said, keeping his back to Pepito, and his everything focused on holding the blade in place.

“What do you think this will do?” Pepito asked. Johnny felt him trying to mask something. He really hoped it was fear.

“This will give you what you deserve,” Johnny said. “Since Edgar losing someone seems so hilarious to you, I thought you needed to be there first hand.”  
“I can destroy you,” Pepito threatened.

“Can you now? Seems I’m the guy with the key, and I can go between here and Hell as long as I can find someone who was less than nice to me in the past.” Johnny gripped the knife tighter. He turned around to look at Pepito, knife still forcing Todd against the wall. With his free hand, he pointed at Pepito.

“You sent me there. You did this to me. You decided you couldn’t handle holding onto a key, and didn’t want to do Daddy’s business anymore. You gave it to me. You thought it was funny, and you wouldn’t tell me a  _god damned thing_  when I asked for it.”

“I couldn’t, I-” Pepito started.

“I DON’T CARE!” Johnny yelled. On his last syllable he drew blood from Todd, and was sure he could feel him shaking.

“You pretended to give a damn, you even wanted to warn me about Edgar, but you didn’t care. All you wanted was to sit at home with Squee here and play games.” Johnny regarded Todd as though sizing him up. “Yes,” he said, “I think I understand you.”

Pepito took a step forward.

“ _However!_ ” Johnny continued, “I would have liked to stay home and watch some infomercials, and, look! I’m not ruining anyone’s life over it! Oh wait!” he said, in mock discovery, “I guess I am.”

“Stop, stop, wait,” Pepito said quickly, “Let me-”

“No,” Johnny said. “I don’t care.”

“You can go, you can go. Give me the key, and you can go.”

“Go and haunt poor Edgar, who is probably at home killing himself anyway? No thanks.”

“No! No!” Pepito yelled, moving quickly towards Johnny. “Don’t hurt him, and I’ll let you go.”

“Swear it, or Squee’s neck stains your wallpaper.”

Pepito said something that Johnny couldn’t understand, and the lock on Pepito’s neck fell to the floor.

“Done,” he said. “Now let him down.”

Todd had been shaking for several minutes, and when Johnny released his hold on him, he crumpled into a ball on the couch. Pepito rushed to his side, and held a pillow to the bleeding on his neck. He alternately told Todd something in Spanish and glared at Johnny.

“Get out,” Pepito growled when Todd’s shaking finally lessened.

“I’m supposed to just poof myself alive, am I?” Johnny asked, snapping the ribbon around his neck and dropping the key and knife to the floor.

“Just go,” Pepito said, with not so much as a glance in Johnny’s direction. “Go make sure he’s not killing himself, and you’ll be back in the morning.”

Johnny wasn’t sure if making sure Edgar wasn’t committing suicide was a prerequisite for being ‘back in the morning’, but hell if he wasn’t going to go anyway.

For half a block, he ran on the sidewalks, and then something dawned on him. He ran straight through houses – through kitchens and televisions and mothers screaming at children. He almost regretted when he finally drifted though the kitchen of Edgar’s house that he’d never be able to do that again.

None of the lights were on. The kitchen had pots and plates and other things Johnny wasn’t sure even belonged in there all over the counters and the floor.

Johnny was happy he’d never notice stepping on the glass.

CD’s were scattered on the floor in the dining room and out into the living room, with a small walkway cleared away in front of the stairs. Edgar was lying on the couch, with the television on, but his face was buried in a cushion. Johnny couldn’t touch him, but found something to knock off the wall to try to startle him. Edgar sat up and looked around for a moment, then flopped back onto the cushions.

He was miserable and he looked awful. Johnny felt responsible or guilty, like he’d died on purpose. Looking around the room, it was no wonder Edgar wanted to bury his face in something and never look out again. Pictures of Johnny or even just the Homicides as a group were on everything; newspapers, magazines, and every channel on the television. The channels were just cycling for some reason and Johnny thought he’d try to stop it, but couldn’t find the remote. He suspected Edgar was lying on it.

He thought he’d try getting Edgar’s attention and write something, but every noise Johnny made was met with a moan of pain. Edgar was not particularly receptive to anything.

There were letters on the floor from people saying they would miss Johnny, and could they please have something of his, that would be great.  Others accused Edgar of murder. Still others had written things like, “I M glud u eelopd with him,” and “UR LUV IS SO TRU.” Johnny worried about the education system sometimes.

So, with hours left until it would be morning, Johnny went to read everything, watch everything.

A magazine detailed an interview with Edgar and the others over the phone.

They were all saying things like, ‘We miss him, but we’re coping,' and 'No, we’re not sure what to do with the band yet.’  Except Edgar. Johnny discovered this to be a trend in everything he looked through – Edgar would say nothing but the standard hello, and would rarely answer anything more than yes or no questions.

‘I can’t stand you people,’ Johnny read in the one instance Edgar had spoken out of turn. ‘You lost one face from the media. I lost everything- my lover and my best friend, and you still shove his image in my face all the time. You’re disgusting.’

He’d said something similar on some talk show, as well, apparently. Only then did it occur to Johnny that he was going to come back from the dead, and that changed things for more people than him.

More letters than Johnny could handle.

He could only read crazed accusations against Edgar for so long before he had to put them down and do something else. How was he going to explain what had happened to him? He thought ‘publicity stunt’ at first, but then thought maybe that was trivializing what Edgar had been through. He’d have to ask him later.  
He watched for the rest of the night. Watched Edgar realize he’d been sleeping on the remote and throw it at the television. Watched Edgar decide to go upstairs. Watched him fight with sleeping in any bed up there.  Watched him collapse into his own, the one Johnny had died on, and listened to him talk himself to sleep.

Johnny couldn’t sleep.

Not that he didn’t want to, he was just dead, and that wasn’t something you did once you crossed over.

He decided Edgar would be as fine as Edgar could be, given the circumstances, and he walked through more buildings. He stared at people sleeping. He visited Devi, who was wrapped around Tenna on her sofa bed. Jimmy had torn apart his apartment and never looked back, apparently, as there was no sign of him. The wallpaper was shredded, shelves broken, and there was evidence that many drinks had been flung against the appliances, but Jimmy himself was nowhere. Todd was no longer alone in his house, and Pepito sat there with him, looking rather distraught. Pepito had wised up and put something on Todd’s neck, and was sitting nervously while Todd slept on the couch by his side.

 _Good_ , Johnny thought.  _Stew in it for a while_.

Coming back in the morning could be interpreted several different ways, so Johnny tried showing up at home at ten to midnight, thinking midnight would count as morning.

No.

Sunrise then, he thought.

Sort of.

He couldn’t see completely through his fingers and elbows anymore, but he was sure that if Edgar woke up now and could actually visualize Johnny, he’d look right through his chest and to the other side of the room. He entertained the idea of how awesome it would be to be just random visual body parts, but then he thought Edgar had been through enough and would likely die if he caught sight of it, and he didn’t want to risk becoming solid in some stranger's house to be able to pull the prank on them. Worse still, he thought, would be getting stuck half-solid in some old lady’s wall.

He felt mostly solid at about 6:15 in the morning, but he had no idea how to tell if he was alive. Breathing was hard to figure out – he’d been going through the motions of breathing ever since he died, despite not needing to. He wasn’t sure he’d pick up the difference when breathing starting doing something. Poking himself with something sharp was an option, but it didn’t appeal to him much.

It was nearly an hour later when he felt the difference between breathing and going through the motions. Johnny choked on the air at first; he hadn’t been expecting it. He coughed several times, and then took one giant gasp, and felt everything go back to normal. He had weight even when he didn’t think about exerting force, and his senses did something close to rebooting.

Edgar flailed a little in his sleep, and fumbled around for something in the dark, muttering to himself. Edgar’s arm brushed Johnny’s hand, and Edgar latched on to it a second later. He made no other sounds or movements, but smiled and continued sleeping. Johnny couldn’t decide whether or not to wake him.  From what he’d seen from Pepito’s little game, Edgar had not slept peacefully for weeks on end, and this would be so nice for him. However, it wasn’t like Johnny hadn’t wanted to see Edgar too.

Just when Johnny raised a hand to wake him, he thought he should maybe not scare Edgar to death and have them with the same ‘one of us is dead’ problem again. From what he’d seen of Edgar’s state, Johnny truly believed that Edgar would react in the worst possible way to being pushed into something, or startled, especially if it involved Johnny.

So he waited. And he felt tired. He was surprised at how quickly he’d forgotten what being tired felt like, but he experienced it as though he was feeling it for the first time. As such, it was hard not to give into.

Johnny woke up to Edgar talking.

“…and now I even see you when my eyes are open. People keep telling me this is going to get better.”

And then there was nothing. He suddenly felt like he'd just been doing something important, but couldn't place it. He was also in someone’s bed, with little to no idea who the man was or how he’d gotten there.

The scruffy looking man screamed and fell off the bed when Johnny went to ask where he was.

“Edgar?” The name just came out when Johnny sat up to see if he was okay. Johnny hoped that was really the guy’s name.

“Oh, god, Nny, holy shit. I’m hallucinating or you’re haunting me.” The man’s face suddenly changed from panicked to desperate as he crawled back onto the bed. “I’ll take haunting. Haunting is fine. Please, by all means. Are you really there?”

“I thiiiink so,” Johnny answered, patting his stomach to check his ‘there’-ness. “But I don’t think I’m haunting anyone.”

“God, what happened? Are you really-? How did you?” The Edgar guy was getting awfully close.

“Look, can we talk more about what I’m doing here?” Johnny asked, backing away. “Because this is freaking me out.”

“What?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I’ve got no idea who you are or why I am suddenly in your bed.”

Edgar-guy looked sick. More than his unshaven face and uncombed hair and dark rings around his eyes already made him look.

“You don’t…?” Edgar choked.  Johnny shook his head.

“Nope. No idea. And if I find out you’ve raped me in my sleep, I will make every attempt to tear you apart.”

“Johnny, seriously. Stop it. You have to be kidding.”

“Okay,” Johnny said, stepping off the bed, and backing close to the wall, “we’ve established that we sort of know each other in that I know your name and you know mine. This is promising, I’ll give you that, but I really have no fucking clue what’s going on.”

“Oh god,” Edgar whispered, burying his face in his hands. “They’re trying to torture me. Giving him back and taking him away, and giving back and taking...”

Apparently, Edgar was insane. This would sort of excuse some kind of date rape, but not entirely. When Johnny really considered it, the fact that he couldn’t recall anything even months prior to the hypothetical act of dubious consent might have meant he was a little crazy, too. He was also going home with random guys, for some reason.

It took him a while to notice that the noise he was hearing was Edgar weeping.

*****

  
Todd woke up hours later. His bleeding had stopped, and nothing even hurt, really. He had something wrapped around his neck, but it didn’t even feel constricting.

“Hey.” Pepito’s voice. “Feeling better now?”

“…Yes.”

“Good. I was worried about you.”

“Pepito…,” Todd said wearily, sitting up. “I’m starting to think that I should have just run and never come back when you told me you were going to follow me through high school.”

_“…with Satan himself by my side!”_

“Ah, but we got out of that just fine, didn’t we?”

“No,” Todd answered, “ _you_  did. I had my old insane neighbor come after me again, because you wouldn’t  _listen_  to me!”

Pepito sighed. “I know. I wanted to talk to you about that.”

This had the potential to be good.

“I am sorry,” Pepito started. “I didn’t mean it to happen this way. I never thought they’d…”

“Never thought that out of five people who could only see each other, that some of them would fall for each other? Pepito, your foresight is astounding.”

“I know, I know. This never should have happened to them. I just wanted to get out of this. I love the power, and the title, but I would have been happier just staying here playing that game with you.”

“You deleted those kids last time, when you wanted to spare anyone affected by the lock system. To give them a better chance. I stayed because I thought you were trying to improve things.”

Pepito gave him an odd look.

“As much as the son of Satan could, I mean,” Todd added. “Then, when you gave him the key… He used to be my insane neighbor, I was terrified of him as kid, and I thought there was no one worse to give it to, and we were all doomed, and I wanted them to just die or disappear somewhere.”

“And-” Pepito started.

“But then I saw Edgar,” Todd continued. “And I felt bad for them.”

“You knew?”

“Yes.”

Pepito touched Todd’s hair. “Miiaa…” Not really a word. “I really deserved this, didn’t I?”

“I think so,” Todd answered.

“I am sorry, amigo. I really am. I made it right in the end, though. Or I tried to.”

“I had to be threatened for you to do it, Pepito! Why is just doing what you got yourself into only considered when I have a dead maniac with a knife at my neck?!”

“It’s hard to want to lose the freedom from it. I don’t have that now. Johnny died, like he was supposed to, and took the key with him, so the key knows what it is now, and someone in charge has to take care of it.” Pepito picked the key up from the spot where Johnny had dropped it. He threaded it onto an extra stretch of material on his belt.

“If you want, Sq- Todd, I’d like to do what I should have done in the first place.”

Todd looked warily at the key, but said nothing.

_“I know you see right through me._ _  
_There's no promise left to break.”_ _

“I can’t stay here all the time,” Pepito continued. “I need to be down there. If you’d come with me, and we could keep a hold on this thing together...,” Pepito held the lock that had fallen from his neck in his other hand, “well, I’d be grateful.”

“You want me to take Johnny’s place, then,” Todd said, looking at his hands.

“No,” Pepito said. “I want you to keep me from doing something stupid again.” He draped the key around Todd’s neck. “You’re good at that, yeah?”  
“Doesn’t mean I want to do it,” Todd answered.

“Please?  I think I’d miss you.”

“You only think?”

“You’re trying to make me sound desperate,” Pepito said.

“One of us has a scary neck wound and he’s being asked to spend his life living in Hell,” Todd answered.

“Alright, alright, I’m desperate. I’d miss you.”

“That’s what I thought.”

*****

Edgar made some decisions in the next few minutes that were selfish, wrong, and probably cruel to someone on some level. That didn’t bother him as much as the fact that he didn’t care how wrong they were. Standing in the bathroom, he examined his face. He thought of trying to fix it up, but worried he’d cut himself in the process given how jittery he was. Still, it was an excuse to get away and think.

From what Edgar understood, Johnny remembered that he knew people called Edgar, Devi and Jimmy, and even Tenna, though he’d called her Tonja or something like that at first, but didn’t know how he knew them, or who they were. Edgar had explained that they were all friends and tried to elaborate on the Homicides and how Johnny should be gone and numerous other things that were too fast and too much. Johnny didn’t want to hear them all so quickly.

Edgar walked back into the room where Johnny was casually strolling around the room, looking at the decorations on the walls, arms folded.

“So, these other people,” Johnny said, checking out some action figures that had been taped to the wall, “should we go see them?”

“No,” Edgar answered, surprising even himself. “No, it would really bother them to see you like this, I think. We’ll just wait until everything comes back.” He would keep Johnny to himself. The others still thought Johnny was dead, and perhaps would think the same of Edgar in a month or two, if this took so long. If Johnny didn’t remember that he had died, he’d have no reason to go tell the others that he wasn’t dead, right?

“Fair enough,” Johnny replied with a shrug. “So, I live here?”

“Yes.”

“With you?”

“Yes.”  Edgar struggled with explaining everything. He didn’t want to overwhelm Johnny with strange new information, especially about their relationship since he’d reacted so strongly to Edgar even drawing near, but he also wanted to hold him and smell his hair and tell him how desperately he’d been missed.

“Well, this is sorta fucked up, but okay,” Johnny said cheerily. “I hope you’re not lying to me.”

“I’m not, I promise.” He left the room but only got a few feet before he realized that he wasn’t being followed.  “What are you doing?” he asked, leaning back through the door.

“Standing here,” Johnny answered.

“Um.”

“I don’t  _remember_  living here, or you and whatever cues you’re throwing at me. Am I supposed to follow you or something?”

“Oh, right. Yeah, come on, I’ll…,” Edgar flinched and paused a moment. “I’ll show you around.”  
  
Edgar toured Johnny around the house that he'd lived in for years, and Johnny took it all in enthusiastically. He was excited by all the food he seemed to remember enjoying, and thrilled at the sight of Edgar's keyboard.  
  
"Edgar, do you play?!"  
  
"...Yes. But not as much as I used to."  
  
Johnny was disappointed only at his own bedroom.   
  
"This is it?" he asked, unimpressed. "It looks like no one's lived in here for ages." Edgar tried to ignore the little wave of pain that came over him.   
  
"I had it cleaned?" Edgar tried.  
  
"And what, did you sell all my shit, too?"  
  
"No, it's all in my room." Johnny didn't even need to give Edgar the raised eyebrow before Edgar hit his forehead. Edgar: 0 Creepy Roommate: 1

“So where have I been?” Johnny asked later as he regarded the living room. “It looks kind of like a war zone in here.”

“The implication that you were the one who did any kind of cleaning is really rather humorous. Were the situation different, I’d be laughing right now.”

“Well, you obviously didn’t do any.”

“You were… gone.”

“Then how did I end up in your bed?” Johnny asked.

“I don’t really know. You were taken from here several months ago. I was just as surprised to see you.”

“Taken?” Johnny echoed, looking up from his inspection of some of the blood on wall near the stairs. “Like, kidnapped or something? Abducted by aliens?”

“A bit like that.”

As they made their rounds through the house, Edgar began disconnecting the cords in the telephones in every room, and he locked the front door. He was still partially horrified by his own behavior, but he wasn’t going to have anyone find out that Johnny was here even if it meant acting a little extreme. He had a chance to get everything he loved back, and no one was going to taint it.

*****

The busy signal again.

Devi held the phone near her jaw, and nervously chewed the antenna a bit. Edgar hadn’t picked up his phone since she’d met him to share the photos, and that had been … weeks ago? Devi wasn’t sure of how much time passed anymore. Everything had been so erratic since Johnny died that she hadn’t bothered to keep track.  Still, Edgar had ignored the phone for weeks on end, and now it wasn’t ringing, but giving a busy signal. 

Talking to someone? But who? Edgar wasn’t the type to go and find some sort of comfort fling at a bar somewhere, so Devi knew he wasn’t leeching pity off of some one night stand. She also felt pretty sure that Edgar was the type who was never going to find anyone else after a loss like the one he’d suffered. She panicked then, dropping the phone.

“God, maybe he’s dead,” she said. “He just disconnected everything and he’s killed himself in the bathtub. Holy fucking shit, Nny would never forgive me if I let Edgar kill himself. He’d fucking haunt me.”

“Devi, are you talking to Edgar or yourself?” Tenna called from the other room.

“Just the voices in my head,” Devi called back. “No one important!”

“Still not picking up, huh?” Tenna walked into the room, wiping her hands on a towel tucked into one of her pockets.

“No. I can’t get anything. I think we might need to go see him. I’m getting worried.”

“You really think he’d kill himself?”

“Ten, okay, think. I’m dead, all right?”

“No, that’s actually not all right at all.”

Devi frowned. “Humor me.”

“Oookaay…”

“Okay, so I’m dead,” Devi said, using her hands to place the situation out in the air. “And this is upsetting to you.”

“Just a little.”

“And you wig out, a lot. You have no one to sit with you all day, and no deep personal issues to resolve.”

“Is Johnny still dead in this hypothetical ‘dropping like flies universe’ we’ve got going on here?” Tenna asked, sitting down. 

“Rrrg, Tenna, sure, yes, he’s dead. Anyway, you’ve got fucking nothing. What do you do?”

“Cry until I feel better? Have a nice funeral and then try to channel my suffering into something productive?”

Devi stuck her lower lip out. “Okay, you’re obviously not getting in the mindset here. You’re Edgar.”

“But then I’m not upset if you’re dead.”

“TENNA.”

“Okay, okay, I’m Edgar, and Johnny is dead,” Tenna said thoughtfully. “I waste away to nothing, I think.”

“Fuck. Gee, thanks.”

“Make up your mind!” Tenna yelled, throwing her arms in the air. “I’m going to finish this thing. Tell me if you want a ride over there. I bet I can drive right through the front of his house.” Tenna left the room without another word.

Devi sighed and held her head in hands. The busy signal beeped at her from the floor.

*****

When there were knocks on his door two days after finding Johnny alive in his bed, Edgar had told Johnny to go find something in the basement for him. Something he knew wasn’t in the basement. Johnny had agreed with no protest at all and disappeared down the stairs, humming something to himself.

Edgar pressed himself against the door, and realized that it was Devi on the other side. He felt instantly guilty, and tried to think of how best to get rid of her. Just let her knock until she couldn’t anymore? Tell her to go away? Better she thought he was alive so she didn’t have Tenna drive a car through his window, he thought.

“I’m fine, leave me alone,” he called through the door.

“Edgar! Edgar, come on, open up! You won’t pick up your phone!”

“The media calls a lot. I’m just done with it. Please go home. I’m fine, don’t worry about it.”

“Edgar!” Devi pounded harder on the door, and Edgar winced, hoping Johnny wouldn’t hear it.

“Devi, please! Come back later!”

“If he knew you were acting like this, he’d fucking kill you!” she screamed. Edgar heard her gasp and then footsteps as she ran away. A door opened and closed on some vehicle not the van and Edgar listened to them drive away. He sighed, closing his eyes.

_It’s okay. She wouldn’t have been able to handle seeing him like this anyway. It’s better like this._

As if to ease his fears, and make all of his justifying valid, Johnny appeared in the doorway to the dining room.

“Edgar,” he asked, “does the house still watch me?”

*****

Everything was bullshit. Devi was utterly and absolutely sure of it.  Johnny  _would_  have killed Edgar if he saw him acting like a selfish prick all the time, even if it had been in really horrible taste to say it.

Tenna was just driving. She took the wrong way when they turned off of Edgar’s road and didn’t bother to alter her course for home. Devi didn’t say anything about it. She hadn’t been saying anything about what Tenna did lately.

They had slept curled together on the sofa bed lately, though Devi hadn’t remembered when it started. Tenna made her things and rarely made a big deal about it. Devi let Tenna braid her hair, or experiment with it while they watched their broken television, and said nothing about it at all.

“What is all this, Tenna?”  They were still driving into nowhere.

“This is cow country, Devi.”

“Not that.”

“I don’t know, maybe you should tell me.”

“You started it.”

“But you’re letting it continue.”

Devi decided right then that she couldn’t afford to take anything or anyone for granted. Tenna could launch them both off of a cliff, and she’d never have gotten to see what Tenna wanted to offer. She’d already lost Johnny, already assumed he’d be there forever – he had had Hell’s key, how could he not be?  Tenna was more mortal than Johnny had ever been, but Devi realized as Tenna turned the car around that this did not mean she was less valuable.

*****

Edgar explained as much as he thought he was able to without ruining Johnny’s chances of truly remembering real information and not just regurgitating ‘remembrances’ like children who spout out the stories they’ve been told of how things were. There comes a point when you hear stories so often that you think you remember them, and as much as Edgar was hoarding Johnny to himself and trying to keep him from everyone else, he didn’t want to cultivate his own Johnny from select memories. Only the real thing.

 The real thing that he was starting to doubt he’d ever see again. Johnny remembered little things, but the things that had really made Johnny himself weren’t there. This Johnny didn’t remember ever having to be strange and intriguing as a teenager to lure other invisible people into doing his bidding. He didn’t remember living in the house he’d called home for years, so he still acted as though he was a guest there. He didn’t remember being close to Edgar so he didn’t joke quite as much at first.

Only a few days elapsed before Johnny seemed to consider Edgar his friend, or, at least not a rapist. He didn’t really know why, but the more this Johnny formed conclusions or opinions on his own, Edgar worried more and more that he’d never find the Johnny he lost.

This Johnny made macaroni for himself and for Edgar, rather than making a bowl and wandering into the living room twenty minutes later with it telling Edgar there wasn’t any left. Logically, Edgar thought, he should have been more attracted to this Johnny, to someone who could probably learn the kind of love they had in the movies on the women’s television network, but he wanted his hypocritical bastard back, and a Johnny who felt bad about not knowing what was going on just made him ache.

Still, they were comfortable. Johnny quickly picked up on Edgar being used to teasing and employed it often.

“Do you know what I did with the remote?” Edgar asked one day.

“OH GOD, I DON’T REMEMBER, HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME? WERE WE FRIENDS?” Johnny screamed in mock-terror.

“Fuck you.”

Somewhere on the blank slate of Johnny, someone hadn’t totally erased Nny.  It gave Edgar hope and crushed something inside of him every time it showed.

Johnny found out that he had been dead when he caught Edgar with a newspaper. Edgar was surprised that his reaction wasn’t stronger.

“I just died?”

“Yeah.”

“What the fuck happened? How did I get back here?”

Edgar shook his head, setting the newspaper aside. “I don’t know. I heard your song, and then-”

“So I have one?” Johnny’s face flashed the same desperate expression Edgar had seen when the song first floated into his head. The topic of death had disappeared instantly.

“Yes, you do.”

“I was worried,” Johnny said. “I can hear yours all the time. It just plays  _at_  me, but I hear nothing from me at all.”

Edgar’s chest tightened. “Sorry.”

“About what?”

“About my song. It’s come after you like that before.”

“It’s okay, it’s not like it’s a bad thing.”  Edgar tried to nod. “Or even a bad song,” Johnny added after a moment. “Just means you’re reacting strongly to me.”

“Oh?” Had Johnny held on to his ability to process songs?

“Sure, people’s songs react to other people. If you really hate that fucker at the post office, your song probably blares over everything he thinks, and most of your speech, too. I think the same happens when you have a strong attraction to someone, but it’s less malicious usually.”

“Only usually?”

“It depends on the strength of both people involved and a lot of other complicated shit that I don’t think I ever knew, missing memory or not.” Johnny poked at some loose threads on the pillow beside him.

“So, how are you supposed to get close to someone who’s being deafened by a song all the time?”  Edgar didn’t feel as guilty asking indirectly about personal events in his and Johnny’s lives as he thought he would.

“Apparently, when they accept you, or your song, or something equally shitty holiday card, it evens out.”

“And what causes a song to just… come out?”

“Out?” Johnny asked. “Like, bust out of people’s rib cages or something?”

“No, I mean, um, develop. Appear, maybe?”

“Oh. Most people always have theirs, you know? So I don’t know how that works, since I… don’t. Yeah.”

“I mean more like… to other people,” Edgar said quietly.

“What you need to ask, instead,” Johnny said, with the faintest air of the arrogant kid who’d invited himself into Edgar’s house on a weekend years ago, “is what’s holding a person’s song back.”

“What’s…?”

“I don’t know. It’s different for everyone.”

“But then what about you?”

Johnny shrugged. “Don’t know. I’m a big mystery to  _both_  of us now.”

  
******

Johnny dropped carelessly onto Edgar's bed, fully intending to tie his sheets in knots or generally make an ass of himself for no reason other than afternoon amusement. He’d gotten used to the idea of living in Edgar’s house in only a few days. The decorations clearly had had some of his influence, even if he couldn’t remember making them. The paintings of little girls modified to be demons that lined the wall by the staircase pleased him the most.

While crawling across the bed to find something on the side of the room to tuck into Edgar’s blankets, Johnny heard something that sounded like crunching paper, and began rooting amongst the covers for the source. Under the pillow, his palm touched something sleek, and he pulled out a slightly bent photograph.  
  
Dark, like whoever had taken it had forgotten to turn on the flash, but the figures were still visible, wrapped around each other, half a moment from a kiss. Johnny kept staring into the faces on the photo, trying desperately to believe what he was seeing.   
  
Himself and Edgar.   
  
Edgar walked in the room just then, not even glancing at Johnny, making his way directly to the dressers and book cases in the room.   
  
"Johnny, have you seen my-"  
  
"You didn't tell me."  
  
"Hu-?" Johnny thrust the photo into Edgar's face. "Oh."  
  
"Is it real?" Johnny asked.

"Yes.”  
  
Johnny pulled the photo back down and stared at it, while something inside him hurt.   
  
"Why didn't you say anything?" he asked.  
  
"Say  _what_? ‘Hi, nice to meet you again, hey, by the way, you used to my boyfriend?!’ Would you have wanted to hear that?" Edgar’s voice shook when he spoke.  
  
"Maybe if I'd known it made you this happy."  
  
"What?"  
  
"We look happy," Johnny said, aching more and more the longer he looked at the image.  
  
"I like to think we were."  
  
"How long?"   
  
"Depends."  
  
"Well, this explains a lot." All of his things in Edgar's room, his mostly unused room, Edgar’s pained expressions. "How the hell have you dealt with me being here?"  
  
"I manage," Edgar said, indicating that he really hadn't been.  
  
"Do you want it back?"  
  
"Of course I do."  
  
"So-"  
  
"But after what I went through the first time, I just don't know if I can."  
  
"'Went through?'" Johnny echoed.  
  
"It took a long time, and it was rather painful. I looked for you, and tried to get close to you and wanted to be nearer still for years." He sighed, and closed his eyes. "I don't know how many more times I can lose you before I'm sure that I'm cursed."  
  
"You don't look like this anymore." Johnny said, gazing into the photograph.  
  
"We  _are_  in make-up in that one. For-"  
  
"That's not what I mean. You haven't looked like this... Do you have any others?"  
  
"Pictures?"  
  
"Yes."   
  
Edgar bit his lip, then nodded, and led Johnny to the other unused bedroom. He took a book from the shelf, and opened the back cover. A small stack of photos spilled out onto the desk in front of them. Johnny reached out to touch them, just to make sure he was really seeing them, and then spread them out on the desktop.  
  
Johnny and Edgar in the middle of a crowd. Johnny was smiling deviously, and Edgar was just laughing. Johnny's arms were around Edgar's neck.   
  
Johnny and Edgar being held cheek to cheek by Devi, who was making a hideous kissy face at the camera. Johnny and Edgar both looked rather annoyed, despite clasped hands.  
  
Johnny pointing enthusiastically at the horizon, covered in tattered rags, and dark circles around his eyes.   
  
There weren't many, and Johnny thought maybe he would not have wanted a lot of pictures taken of him being close to Edgar, thus why so few had been collected.   
  
"Holy shit," Johnny said finally. "We really were..."  
  
"Yes."  
  
"God, look how happy you are in all of these...," Johnny marveled, flipping photo after photo out of his hands. "I died and took all this with me."   
  
"You don't have to remind me."   
  
"No, I don't mean it like that. I mean, I'm sorry. I didn't know I had been this special to you. Even the way you look at me is different now."  
  
"How so?"  
  
"It's the same look," Johnny said, holding a photo close-up of himself and Edgar next to Edgar's cheek, "but it looks like it hurts now."  
  
"So it really  _is_  you in there," Edgar said, with only the slightest hint of humor.  
  
Johnny grinned and took the photo away from Edgar's face.   
  
"So what now?" he asked.  
  
"Nothing," Edgar answered. "I can't just say 'this is how it used to be, so this is how it will continue to be' when you don't even regard me as your best friend anymore."  
  
"Best is pretty relative," Johnny said. Edgar flinched. "I mean, we might not be this close, but I'm closer to you than Devi or the other two. I haven’t even talked to them." Edgar felt a pang of guilt, but tried to continue normally.  
  
"But I think we're both in agreement that that's not enough to get to any of this again." Edgar gestured at the pile of photos.   
  
"So come closer."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Come closer, get closer. These are all what you want, aren't they?"  
  
"Yes, but you-"  
  
"ME? Are you even  _looking_  at these?" Johnny squeaked. "For fuck's sake,  _look_  at me! I look elated in all of these! Like I'm on some kinda high." He stopped for a moment, and stared into another photo. "I  _want_  to remember this. I want you to show me this stuff."  
  
"I don't think-"  
  
"Show me, it's okay."  
  
"You can't say things like that," Edgar mumbled. "It's hard enough to hold back without-"  
  
"So don't! You want to hang on to me or something?" He held his arms out to his sides and spun in a circle once. "Okay, do it. Maybe it'll help me remember."   
  
"I do want to. Desperately. But not while it's not what you want."  
  
"I just said it was, didn't I? I want to remember. I want to be this happy again." He held the original offending picture in front of Edgar's nose. Edgar looked away, and took a step back.   
  
"I can't," he said. "I just can't. I courted you and chased you for months, maybe years if I really admit to myself, I can't just-"  
  
"Then I'll do it."  
  
"You'll... what?"  
  
"I'll chase  _you_."  
  
"That's... really not necessary."  
  
"I think it is. I think we've been robbed." Johnny took a step forward.  
  
"Johnny, it's okay, really," Edgar said, backing away again.  
  
"What's the hang up, hmm? From the look of these - no, from what you've just told me, even - you really want this back. You want _me_  back."  
  
"It's not quite the same," Edgar replied slowly.  
  
"I'm still the guy in these pictures! I just don't remember being him!"   
  
Edgar stared at Johnny for a moment, then shook his head.  
  
"A long time ago," he said, "you told me just the opposite."  
  
Johnny squinted back at him.  
  
"You told me that a person is made by the memories they have,” Edgar said quietly. “I know you to look at you, to hear your voice, even by the way you move, and the way you look at things, but I'm not sure that you're the person I lost."  
  
"But, I-"  
  
"I don't think I want to keep talking about this right now."  
  
"So you'll talk about it later, then."   
  
"I- Alright. If that's what you want."  
  
"Yes."

  
******

 

Later turned out to be that evening, in front of an infomercial that Johnny was studying intently.  
  
"I think I've seen this one before," Johnny said. "Don't they unclog sinks at a mall or something?"  
  
"Yeah, that's it. I think there's that woman who gets disproportionately excited near the end, too."  
  
"Yes!" Johnny dropped the bowl of Skettios in his outburst and he and Edgar just watched the orange goo ooze into the floor.   
  
"So is it later yet?" Johnny asked.  
  
"I guess so."  
  
"So, we're going to go somewhere," Johnny said to the Skettios.  
  
"We are?"  
  
"Yeah, you're going to go somewhere with me."  
  
"Johnny, I don't want to sound like a total dick here, but, do you even  _remember_  places to go?"  
  
"Trust me."   
  
Edgar's heart hurt. "Okay."  
  
"Should we clean this up?"  
  
"I'll get it."

  
*****

  
He was running through the rain with Johnny dragging him by the wrist. The touch was familiar, the movements when he ran were familiar, but something about the person behind both wasn't. Every so often, Nny would crop up in the blank slate of a man that Edgar had living in his house, but for the most part, he was just Johnny.  
  
Johnny took them to the school, which Edgar hadn't been in for years.   
  
"Johnny, wait," he said, when Johnny flung open a door that he'd unlocked with no trouble at all. "I don't think I want to do this."  
  
"I asked you to come with me," Johnny said, putting on his mock-hurt voice. "You'd bail out on me now?" A flash of Nny again.  
  
"No." Never.  _Even if I wanted to._  
  
They ran down the hall, past doors and rooms and closets and hallways that had been home for Johnny years ago. Johnny unlocked a door that had long ago become familiar and haunting to Edgar.   
  
The roof.  
  
  
Johnny opened his mouth to say something dramatic when they stepped out onto the gravel covered surface, but Edgar interrupted him before he could even think not to.  
  
"You knew all of those locks."  
  
"...yeah."  
  
"But you don't remember me."  
  
Johnny was quiet.   
  
"I can't control what I remember," he said softly, after a moment of silence. "I've already told you I want to remember you. I want to remember those pictures."  
  
"And the roof is good for this how?"  
  
"Don't tell me I have fake memories in there, too," Johnny replied with a crooked smile. "I know I brought you up here before."  
  
"You did. A long time ago."  
  
"Good," he said, hoisting himself up on the ledge around the roof. He slid back until he was on the very edge of the concrete blocks. "So what can you tell me?"  
  
"Tell you?" Edgar felt nervous just looking at Johnny sitting on the wet blocks, but tried not to show any obvious twitches.  
  
"Tell me about what you want me to remember. About what you want. About what you had."  
  
"Johnny..."  
  
"About me. I want to remember."  
  
"I don't think this is quite the way to go about it."  
  
"That's fine. I can just lean back here and never be seen aga-!"  
  
"DEAR GOD, NNY, DON'T YOU DARE!" Arms around him before he realized he had moved. Fuck. Years later, and he still fell for that. Johnny laughed at him.  
  
"I thought so," he said. "No, it's okay, don't let go."  
  
Edgar made an irritated noise, and climbed up onto the ledge beside Johnny. He replaced his arms when Johnny gave him the eyebrow face.  
  
"So maybe I'll ask you things instead," Johnny said when Edgar had gotten situated. "I'm interested in what you called me."   
  
"What I-? Oh." Edgar tried to laugh. "'Nny.'"   
  
"You called me that?"  
  
"We all did."  
  
"Who came up with it?"  
  
"I don't know," Edgar said, resting his head against Johnny's shoulder. "I wasn't there for it. Maybe Devi, maybe you. You told me to call you Nny from the first time we met."  
  
"So you should keep doing it."  
  
"It's more of a habit, really," Edgar replied, shaking his head. "I'm not sure that Johnny and Nny are the same person."  
  
"We're going to argue about this until I remember everything, aren't we?"  
  
"Do you think you will?"  
  
"Do  _you_  think I will? You might know my track record better than I do."  
  
"I don't know,” Edgar sighed. “Considering my luck, I'd say no, but considering your tendency to have even the weirdest shit you want come true, it's possible."  
  
"Hey, I think I needed to be told about that earlier," Johnny said, sitting up straighter. "Do you think there's some place around here we can hit with a meteor?"  
  
"It's not God powers."  
  
"Oh, fuck that. You know, I've heard he's pretty lame." He stuck his lower lip out for a moment. "Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't know where I've heard that, but I know I've heard it."  
  
"Satan's son isn't much better."  
  
"Oh, shit."  
  
"What?"  
  
"He lives around here, doesn't he?" Johnny stood up abruptly, nearly knocking Edgar off of the roof.  
  
"What the hell?"  
  
"Do you know which house is his?"  
  
Edgar slipped off of the ledge, and sank to a sitting position on the gravel base of the roof. Safe there.  
  
"There shouldn't even be a house there anymo- Yeah, wait a minute." Despite that he'd just sat down, Edgar climbed to his feet and went to point out Pepito's house. Still there, with no hint of a black hole, was the house in question. The lights were on and Edgar could see shadows of movement.  
  
"That's the one," Edgar said, pointing. Johnny was already staring at it.   
  
"I think I remember starting out there."  
  
"Starting when, now?"  
  
"This whole remembering nothing thing. I started at that house."  
  
"You came from Pepito?" Edgar's head throbbed a little. "I wonder if he just decided to give you back."  
  
"Back?" Johnny asked, turning only barely toward Edgar, as though he thought he needed to keep strict watch on the house.  
  
"He disappeared with you when you died. From that day, until today, I can't remember the house being there."  
  
"Let's go see them," Johnny said, and he turned for the door.  
  
"No!" Edgar grabbed Johnny's wrist, and pulled him back. "He's not a nice person, really. And he'll just manipulate you with some false truths and it'll really be going backwards."  _False truths, huh?_  
  
"Way to have faith in me."  
  
"Johnny, you can't  _remember_  anything!" Edgar stressed his outburst by tugging sharply on Johnny's arm. "How will you know the difference when he says that he's going to help you and does something irreversible?"  
  
"And if it's a  _good_  irreversible?"  
  
"It won't be. He's the son of fucking Satan."  
  
"I wonder what happened to Satan Version One," Johnny asked, staring into the sky above him.  
  
"That is really the last of your concerns, I'd think."  
  
"Do we know, though?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Damn. Well, fine. We won't go." Johnny sat on the ledge again, pulling himself from Edgar's grip easily. "What  _do_  I know?"  
  
Edgar looked at his hand, which really should have still been holding Johnny's wrist, as far as he was concerned, and then shook his head. Maybe Nny really was still in there.  
  
"Things you know..." Edgar said thoughtfully, drumming his fingers on the ledge of the roof. "You know that Pepito is Satan's son, and that he seems to be perpetually chasing a relationship with Squee. You know everything about songs, whether they come from people or not. You know every key to every lock in this building and you know all the words to about 50 infomercials and several horrible old movies."  
  
"Horrible movies?"  
  
"Horrible."   
  
"I detect a bias."  
  
" _Horrible_."  
  
"Go on."  
  
"I don't know, I'm having a hard time saying, 'You know this,' when I'm wondering if really it's 'he knew this.'"  
  
Johnny shrugged. "So tell me about 'him' instead."  
  
"That's not the sort of stuff you'd want to hear, I imagine."  
  
"I asked for it, didn't I?"  
  
Edgar thought, for a moment, that maybe it was possible that this person really was the one he'd lost, coming back gradually. If he came back from Pepito, especially. Maybe Pepito was holding the memories ransom?  
  
"Sure, you asked," Edgar answered, "but it doesn't mean you'll enjoy it."   
  
"I've been enjoying this whole fucked up ride, really. You think you can sappy-talk me into jumping off the roof?"  
  
"Can we stay away from the jumping off the roof in all forms?"  
  
"Only if you talk," Johnny joked, leaning back and dangling his arms off the edge.  
  
"You're still a manipulative bastard, but okay."  
  
"I like the implication that you were in love with a manipulative bastard."  
  
Edgar shrugged. "We can't all be perfect."  
  
"So okay, stop stalling," Johnny said, hitting Edgar's arm. "Talk. Fill me in on all of this."  
  
Edgar struggled with his pronouns for a few moments. 'He'? 'You'? Which was more appropriate? Finally, rather than worry about them and their usage, he just ignored them completely.  
  
"Knew things about people that they didn't even know. Felt people's feelings and songs so much stronger than tactile sensations, I think. Could slip out of absolutely everything. Knew when things 'just were.'" Edgar stopped to judge Johnny's reaction, but saw nothing he could really use. Johnny just regarded him quietly, arms folded over knees he had drawn up to his chest.   
  
"Often sat just like that," Edgar continued, looking back out into the lights of the houses below. "Once wore a ring for weeks on end until people suspected some kind of engagement and then announced it had just been found in the drain. Drove an entire flock of fundamentalists out of their convenience store with only a Freezie and some slink."  
  
"Some slink?" Johnny asked, smirking. "Are we talking black dress here? I think we could modify the coat."  
  
"I'm taking back what I said before and I'm going to push you off."  
  
"Can I slink off?"  
  
"You can jus-" Edgar stopped. 'Die', 'fuck off' and 'go to hell' were all vastly wrong in this situation.   
  
"Yeah, that's awkward," Johnny said, scratching at something behind his ear. "I'm done with slink now, go ahead."  
  
"I don't know that I want-" Edgar started before Johnny leaned back over the ledge, his head and shoulders over the side. "Okay, okay! Just stop doing that!"  
  
Johnny laughed and folded himself back into his prior position. Edgar sighed and debated using the silent treatment. Against better judgment, he went on.  
  
"My best friend. Everything I could really fathom wanting to be around. The source of everything that was awesome in our world and everything fucked up at the same time. Manipulative and odd. Had a very keen understanding of people, despite claiming not to. Everything I'd ever been conscious of wanting, I think. And everything I wasn't conscious of, too."  
  
"What do you think we should do, then?" Johnny asked.  
  
"Do?"  
  
"To make me remember."  
  
Edgar almost answered 'Ask Pepito.' Instead, he tried to honestly think about it. Would triggering a memory of the start of the relationship spark it?   
  
"Maybe if we mimed it at you," Edgar said into his hands. "Or perhaps a puppet show."  
  
"You don't want me to remember anything."  
  
"No, tha-"  
  
"You don't," Johnny said, pulling Edgar's hand from his face. "I'm ruining your martyrdom here, aren't I? Am I ruining your memory of me? Tarnishing it with some guy who doesn't know every little quirk, every little in and out of what happened with you and the others?" He pulled Edgar's hand enough that Edgar made eye contact. "A guy who can't slink?"  
  
"Oh, believe me, you can," Edgar replied. "Really."  
  
Johnny dropped Edgar's arm in disgust.   
  
"I don't know what the hell to do with you," he muttered. "I come back from the dead, maybe a little altered, yet you float around between being clearly thrilled and indifferent."  
  
"I can't help it," Edgar said, rubbing his wrist. "I lost someone amazingly important to me, who is arguably you, and arguably not you. I can't not feel both ways."  
  
"You don't seem to want to help me remember anything."  
  
"I don't want to train you, or have you playing a part. I can tell you everything, and eventually, you'll think you remember it. That's not what I want."  
  
“What difference would it make?”

“All the difference in the world.”

*****

After the night on the roof, Johnny was true to his word that he would chase Edgar. It was in tiny ways, really, and Edgar would have been disturbed if even this Johnny had gone any bigger than making food or taking Edgar to places that he remembered being significant.  There was one trip to a hill top that Edgar had not even known existed, let alone been on it with Johnny before. Johnny had grinned and said, “Ooooh, spoilers. Maybe I had this in mind for something once. Will we ever know? Tune in next week!”

And one day, Edgar had an idea. It seemed unlikely and probably would end in Edgar being laughed at, but he was angry at himself for not considering it earlier, and he wanted to try it.

“Johnny,” he said, staring at the old keyboard against the wall, “can I show you something?”

Johnny, who was absorbed in some news report about aliens, didn’t answer.

“Johnny?”

“Don’t we know this guy?”

Trenchcoat Guy was on the screen, telling the spunky reporter that he had real proof of alien life, if they’d just give him a few moments. They often didn’t let him finish his sentences, and the more he protested, the more they patted him on the head or grinned vacantly into the camera as though they couldn’t even hear him.

“Yeah,” Edgar answered. “That’s Dib. I don’t really know where he came from, or why we know him, exactly. He says his dad is the guy who invented Super Toast.”

“No shit?”

“We’re not sure if we believe him.” Edgar stood up and motioned toward the keyboard. “Can you come with me for a second?”

Johnny shrugged and followed. He looked disappointed when it wasn’t a fieldtrip longer than a few feet, but sat down in the bench in front of the keyboard beside Edgar with no complaints.

“I’m going to try something,” Edgar explained, poking a few buttons. “I don’t know how well it will work, because I don’t know if remember it well enough, but I want you to listen to this for me.”  
  
“O…kay.”

Edgar stared at the keys for a few moments. There was no way he even had the right synthesized instruments on the keyboard. Violins might have been close, but were still not close enough. He eventually just settled on the default and explained that this would be the reduced quality version.

“I don’t think I’ll notice,” Johnny replied.

“I will,” Edgar said, touching a single key. “I’m going to have to try to hum this other part of it, and I’m not sure I’ll even get it all and-”

“What the fuck  _is_  it?”

“That’d be  _cheating_. Just listen, okay?”

And he played. He played every scrap of Johnny’s song that he could remember. When pieces overlapped, he hummed, and when he lost the tune or forgot he improvised until it came floating back to him. When he found he was comfortable playing this sad imitation of the song, he glanced at Johnny, who seemed fascinated not by the song, but by the movements of Edgar’s fingers. Edgar slumped a little when he realized the effort hadn’t worked, and his notes faltered. Johnny jumped and shot him an accusing glare and Edgar quickly straightened his back and continued.

“I should know this,” Johnny said, still watching Edgar’s fingers.

“Maybe something like it,” Edgar answered.

“How do I know this?”

“I don’t really know if you do, I just thought if anything could help, this song would.” Edgar sighed, still playing. “But I’m not even sure I’m doing it right.”

Johnny pulled his knees to his chest, and Edgar worried he’d topple off of the bench.

“I think I’d like to eat something,” Johnny said.

Edgar let the song stop, disappointed. It seemed to have had an effect on Johnny, but not the one he’d so sorely wished for. How much longer was he going to be able to convince Johnny that the others didn’t need to see him? How much longer could he justify this mess to himself?

Edgar set to work making some sandwiches, and Johnny actually volunteered to help him. Edgar had sort of hoped he wouldn’t.

They ate upstairs, on Edgar’s bed, in front of the television that had long since been covered in action figures, weird flyers, and postcards.  There was something on that wasn’t a monster movie or an infomercial, but was just as entertaining.  Edgar wasn’t really following it, but it was late and he wasn’t really expecting to. Before he went to ‘rest his eyes’ the last time, he thought of how nice it would be to fall asleep next to Johnny again.

He opened his eyes again when he felt something poke him in the ribs.

“Mmrmm?”

“Edgar, Edgar, Edgar. The song. Hum the song again.” Johnny sounded a bit frantic.

“Uh-wha? What’s wrong?”

“Song,” Johnny repeated. His eyes were wide and he looked like this was a matter of great importance. This meant it either was, or it was something dumb and trivial. 

Edgar played along and hummed as well as he thought he could, but was groggy and confused. A woman screamed on the television, and it was dark in the room but for the glow of the black and white film that only scared people a million years ago.

Johnny made no sounds for a while. He sat staring off at the wall, and Edgar was about to roll over and count ‘humming in the spot where Johnny had died’ in his collection of failed ways to make him remember when Johnny suddenly flopped onto his side from his sitting position, grabbed Edgar’s wrist and stared him in the face.

“Hi,” he said. He looked like he had a secret that he was dying to share.

“Hi?”

“I think it’s been a while.” Johnny slid his fingers down Edgar’s wrist and took his hand.

“Nny?” Edgar didn’t know if he was shaking, or if Johnny was.

“Hi.” 

“Oh god.”

And everything lurched. It was still dark, and the television still blared, but something had changed. Johnny had noticed it too, and sat up abruptly. Edgar’s hand burned.

“What was that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You felt it too, right?”

“Yes.”

Edgar sat up and looked around the bedroom. Nothing looked strange or altered in any way, but something had settled. Something had stopped.

“Edgar,” Johnny said.  Edgar looked at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence. Johnny didn’t say anything, but put a hand to the side of his face. Edgar raised an eyebrow at him, but mimicked the motion himself. He was startled to feel the scratch of hair on his cheek.

“Whoa, didn’t I just…?”

“Yesterday, I think.”

“There’s no way it could have gotten that bad in a single day. It hasn’t been this bad since before you-” He felt the burn on his hand and stopped to stare at Johnny, who was clad, for some reason, in his black coat. Had he been wearing it before? “Nny?”

“Yes.”

“Oh god. Oh god, it’s you,” Edgar pulled Johnny into a tight hug. He thought surely his heart would shatter his lungs at any moment. “Is it really you? You remember? Oh god, I’m dreaming, or I’m going insane.”

“No, no, it’s me. You’re not dreaming. I’ll get back to you on insane.” Both shaking, Edgar discovered.

“Oh god, it’s you, it’s you, it’s you!” Edgar nearly smothered Johnny trying to hold onto him. “Are you staying like this?  _Can_  you stay? Oh God, please stay.”

“What, you think I’m just gonna forget again? Like I can do it at will?” Johnny was trying to joke, but something was shaking in his voice. Edgar had only ever heard that when Johnny was terrified.

“I don’t know what you’re capable of anymore. What if you remember and he comes and takes you again?” He brushed his nose near Johnny’s ear and felt Johnny try to pull away.

“It’s all right,” Johnny said shakily when Edgar backed off. “You just feel like sandpaper, you freak.”

“It really is you, isn’t it?”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Johnny asked through a smirk. “I’m sort of disappointed in you for not trying my song earlier, though. You’d think that would have been obvious.”

“You could be faking,” Edgar said seriously, gripping Johnny’s arm. “I need some kind of test.”

“You can’t fake awesome like this, I’m pretty sure.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s you.”

Johnny grinned and then laughed.

“Sorry it took so long,” Johnny said as Edgar hugged him again. “I think remembering is tricky like that.”

“I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.”

“Actually, speaking of remembering…” Johnny tried to pry Edgar away, but Edgar wouldn’t move.

“Don’t, please. I haven’t been able to get this close for so long.” Johnny stopped trying to tear away from Edgar and just sat. Edgar wondered momentarily if Johnny was actually shaken up enough to not dodge away from him this time. Edgar felt Johnny’s arms across his back and wanted to melt into him. Really him. Really Nny and not just Johnny. Really the lover he’d lost and not an empty coloring book version. Whatever had happened to them or to the room or to the house or to the world didn’t matter.

 

*****

 

Johnny remembered. Johnny remembered remembering and not remembering. Things had rushed back to him all at once, and his body was taking a while to catch up. At least three lives of memories had crammed suddenly into one too-thin shaking body. Johnny remembered things he wished he didn’t, and things he couldn’t believe he ever forgot.

Edgar had lied to him. And to Devi and the others.

Johnny had done something horrible to get here.

He didn’t know who had done worse.

“Edgar, I think I really need to tell you this,” Johnny said, pushing Edgar away enough to look him in the eye.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“I need to tell you about what happened. Why I’m here.”

“You’re here to kill me.”

“No, jeez! No, I just need to tell you about what happened.”

“Can it wait?” Edgar asked, burying his face in Johnny’s collarbone. “God, you even smell like you.”

“No, no, it really,” Johnny pried Edgar away yet again, “really can’t. Please, you’ve got to listen to me, just-” Johnny wasn’t sure how he wanted to end that sentence, so he didn’t bother with it.

Edgar looked near tears. “I’ve missed you so much. It wasn’t the same when we weren’t…”

Johnny gave up, if only for now. “I know,” he said quietly. “I saw. I missed you, too, even when I couldn’t remember it. I’m so sorry.”

“You could see me? Back when-?”

“Yeah, Pepito made sure I couldn’t  _not_  see you.”

“Pepito?” Edgar asked. “I hoped you wouldn’t have gone… Even if he  _did_  take you.”

“You have more faith in me than I do,” Johnny said, smiling.

Edgar looked like he would melt. “I didn’t think I’d ever see that again…”

Johnny laughed lightly. He felt pretty sure he’d smiled at Edgar while memory-less, but let it go. For all he knew, Edgar really saw a difference in the way a Johnny with memories smiled than one without. “I’m sorry, Edgar.” 

Edgar nuzzled the side of Johnny’s head and the phantom stubble scratched at Johnny’s skin. “Stop apologizing,” Edgar murmured to Johnny’s ear. “There’s nothing wrong. You’re home. Everything’s fine.”

Johnny tried to lean away from the attention again, as much as part of him did not want to. “Edgar, no, there  _is_  something wrong. Please, this is important.”

Edgar backed off, and looked at Johnny with an expression of clarity that Johnny hadn’t seen in some time. He brushed the back of a few curled fingers on Johnny’s cheek, but didn’t let it last long.

“I’m sorry,” Edgar said quietly. “Everything in my entire world just came back. Can you blame me?”

“Maybe,” Johnny said with a brief smirk, “but I’ll let it go. Can I tell you this now?”

Edgar nodded and clasped one of Johnny’s hands in his.

“Pepito told me about what you said back when you brought us both back from last time,” Johnny said. “That you wanted to make me happy.”

“Sure,” Edgar answered, nodding, “but I’ve told you that, even just recently. What does-?”

“Let me finish this, okay?” Johnny cut him off. “When I died, I told you I was happy. That I could die happy, right?”

Edgar flinched.

“They’d been planning on taking that all pretty literally since this whole thing started, apparently. I was going to die the moment you made me happiest.”

Johnny watched Edgar’s expression melt into horrified, and realized he needed to stop and clarify things before going on.

“Oh god, Nny, I didn’t know, I didn’t even- They never said! I didn’t-! Can it happen again? Will it-?” Edgar was shaking as he spoke.

“Edgar, no, no. Stop. It’s not you. You didn’t do anything. It’s not your fault. You made me  _happy_  for fuck’s sake - I’d need to be messed up to blame you for that.”

“God, Nny, I can’t… I mean, I did that to you?” He mumbled something about ‘horrible person’ but Johnny didn’t catch it.

“No. No, you didn’t. It was fucking  _Pepito_ , okay? I was slated to be with him in Hell when I died no matter how it happened before. You apparently made it more amusing for them. It was just once. He can’t do it again.”

“God, Nny, I am so sorry, I didn’t know. I thought… Why did-How did you…?” Edgar spoke as he processed things.

“Pepito knew,” Johnny continued, with some residual bitterness. “And I sat there, trapped and forced to look at you suffer, and he loved it, and I wanted to do something to him. He told me that I could haunt people, when I asked him if I could. So I went after Squee. You know, Todd.”

“Nny-”

“Wait. Just wait,” Johnny said, holding up his hand. “I’m not done.  I went there to kill him.” Johnny felt Edgar’s grip on his hand tighten, and saw something change in his eyes. “I didn’t,” he added quickly. “I think you know that by now. But I had a knife on him and everything. Pepito let me back here to spare him.”

Edgar was silent, but he didn’t release Johnny’s hand.

_“tether me_  
 _to next moment”_

“He took the key, and responsibility for his own shit, and told me I’d be here again, alive, the next morning. He didn’t mention this funny little ‘with no memory’ bullshit.”

“You were going to kill for me?”

Johnny opened his mouth, not sure what the right answer to that was. Then he felt calm from Edgar and something just slowed.

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” Edgar said, pressing his forehead to Johnny’s.

“Edgar…”

“I thought of following you so many times,” Edgar spoke just above a whisper, sounding almost amused. “Even while you were here not remembering, I thought about it. I came up with ways of doing it instead of eating. Which might have been a way of doing it, now that I’m thinking about it,” Edgar smiled, and shrugged. “But I didn’t, even when I had the intent. Even when I walked into a room not expecting to leave it ever again, I didn’t do it.”

Edgar tightened his hold on Johnny’s hand.

“It’s the same,” he said. “The intent was there, but it’s the action and actually doing it that will damn you. It’s okay. I’m glad you didn’t kill him.”

Johnny thought for sure this would have had a larger impression on Edgar. He worried that it meant one of them was a little crazy. Edgar’s behavior the prior two weeks were contributing to this hypothesis rather well, regardless.

“Glad you didn’t follow me,” Johnny answered. “You would have hated it.”

“That’s sort of what it’s there for, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Johnny said. “Why didn’t you? What stopped you?”

Edgar wrapped an arm around Johnny and pulled him as close as he could manage.

“I didn’t want to do it in front of you while you were here, memories or no. It would be just Pepito’s style to give you back to me as I bled to death on a carpet somewhere. That and I didn’t know where I would go,” Edgar answered. “I didn’t know what I deserved. And no matter what I deserved, I thought I wouldn’t be able to see you.”

Johnny tried to get away with just raising an eyebrow to get Edgar to continue, but Edgar’s eyes were closed.

“What do you mean?”

“I thought, if I was lucky, and deserved Heaven, then that would mean I should be with you.  I didn’t think you deserved Hell, but I got scared that you’d been sent there anyway. If I deserved to be with you, then I’d have to go to Hell, which I wouldn’t have deserved in that scenario. On the other hand,” Edgar said when he heard Johnny make a pondering sound, “if I was going to deserve Hell for killing myself, they wouldn’t have let me in because you’d be there.”

“You’d be a theological volleyball for eternity.”

“Yeah.”

“They’d have let you into Heaven.”

“Oh, you think so?”

Johnny nodded against Edgar’s neck. “Yeah. You’ve got their book still. I apparently went to Hell based solely on the key.”

“You didn’t deserve it.”

Johnny wanted to say ‘I know’ or ‘How do you know?’ or something else equally witty, but it all seemed wrong to him. Didn’t fit.

“What was it like, Nny?” Edgar asked softly.

“Like here. Just pettier and dumber.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” Johnny said. “I didn’t spend much time down below. Pepito and I really just kept surveillance and I… let people in. It all looked familiar, though.”

“So, it’s really not anything like-?”

“Like Hell? No. From what I got, only really stupid people go there, anyway.”

“So it won’t be so bad, then,” Edgar said, leaning his head onto Johnny’s.

“You think you’re headed there?”

“Aren’t we both?”

“For what?”

Edgar tightened his hold on Johnny. “For this.”

Johnny laughed at him. “No. No we’re not. You haven’t really looked at Pepito, have you?”

“Pepito doesn’t strike me as sympathetic, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, he’s got Squee.”

“Nny.”

“Really!”

“Won’t he be taking Squee to the wrong place if he brings him to Hell with him when he dies, then? If we factor in gay not equaling Hell, I mean.”

“I like how you think that Pepito is going to let Squee die, ever.”

Edgar picked his head up. “Pepito can do that?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t make much sense to me either, really.”

******

Edgar refused to move very far from Johnny at all since he’d been convinced that Johnny was really the Johnny he had lost, so Johnny felt lucky that the bathroom was close enough that he could convince Edgar to actually fix his face – supernaturally altered or not, it was still unpleasant. Johnny remembered finding it a little strange when he first came back from Pepito’s that he was the one who had died, and it was Edgar who came out looking hellish.

Johnny had had to swear he wouldn’t call Pepito or spontaneously forget everything while Edgar wasn’t in the room. Edgar also kept trying to continue talking to him over running water. Johnny just yelled ‘okay’ every few minutes and hoped he wasn’t agreeing to anything he’d regret later.

Edgar reappeared after Johnny had rearranged everything he could find in the room, including the armies of broken ceramic babies making a tactical strike on the unicorns.

“Hey, it’s that guy I haven’t seen in forever,” Johnny joked.

“It wasn’t that bad, Nny, jeez.”

“Just keep telling yourself that.”

Disappointingly enough, Edgar didn’t even fight it. Johnny had been waiting for at least a ‘fuck you.’ He sighed, and put down whatever little knick knack he’d been plotting to hide and sat back on the corner of the bed.  Edgar was immediately as close to him as Johnny thought possible.

“I don’t want to tell them, Nny,” he said, resting his head on Johnny’s shoulder.

“What? Tell who?”

Edgar was silent for a while. He held Johnny a little tighter and let out a sigh.

“You know, the others. Devi, Jimmy.”

“Edgar.” He’d wondered when it would come up.

“I know, I know,” Edgar said, pressing his face against Johnny’s neck. Circumstances aside, Johnny was quite glad that that felt much less like steel wool now. “I know we have to, I know  _everyone_  has to know. I just want to keep it like this.  Eventually, people would forget about me, think I’d died like I kept saying I would, and we’d be the only people in the world.”

“I’m going to be a good person here and tell you that I am sort of repulsed by how attractive I find this idea,” Johnny answered. “But that I am also repulsed by the idea itself. Which makes it attractive, I think.”

“Hang on,” Edgar said, and Johnny felt him smile. “I bet I can think up another one.”

“Don’t,” Johnny told him. “I don’t need moral dilemmas cropping up at every turn for my first day back.”

“I’ll save it for later, then.”

“We have to tell them, Edgar. You already lied to them, and to me.”

Edgar sighed, and tightened his hold on Johnny again.

 “I know,” he said sadly. “I just feel like they don- God, that’s horrible, I can’t even believe I almost said that.” Johnny looked at the wall, and then up at the ceiling. Edgar picked his head up.

“You’re not going to ask me what it was?” he asked, sounding surprised.

“I know what it was.”

“I can’t help it,” Edgar said apologetically.

“It’s okay.” Johnny turned to look back at Edgar. Edgar averted his eyes almost immediately. It was rare for Edgar to not value eye contact.

“We don’t have to tell them,” Johnny said.  Edgar’s gaze snapped back up to meet Johnny’s eyes. 

“We-” Edgar started.

“Not today,” Johnny finished.

“Please don’t make me feel guilty about this later, I already know it was horrible, I just missed you so much, and I wanted-”

“What’s to feel guilty about? We’re the only people on the planet today.”

*****

For months he’d dreamed of things like this, and for months he’d convinced himself they were just silly fantasies. Now seeing Johnny truly restored to who he been before, memories and all, made Edgar feel like he hadn’t put enough faith in Johnny’s will to not be fucked around with.

_“When you caught my eye  
I saw everywhere I'd been”_

Johnny was strolling around the house, taking everything in again. He told Edgar that he thought he remembered how it all was, but wasn’t sure which set of remembrances about the state of his home were the newest and most accurate.

“It’s strange to see my face on everything,” he said, picking up a stack of paper that had been sitting on the table. “I don’t remember taking half of these pictures. You didn’t show these to me before.”

“I sort of… looked at those while you were asleep. I didn’t even have Homicides Johnny anymore, let alone the Johnny I’d loved, and I missed them both. I had lots of fans send me things, and a few of them are from Devi.” He’d thank Devi for the borrowed words later.

“Devi?”

“Yeah,” Edgar nodded. “She had that camera the week before you…”

“Oh.  That makes these sort of creepy.” Johnny studied the images closely, then smiled. “This is awesome. I’m looking at the last pictures taken of me before I died.”

Edgar reached over and put his hand on the papers, suggesting that Johnny set them down. He took the hint.

“I’m sorry,” Edgar said. “I just don’t want to think about it.”

“Hey, it’s fine! I’m definitely here and I remember you! Look!” Johnny turned around in place once, with his arms out. “I even got a magic Hell Coat out of the deal!”

“It is nice, actually. Is it going to disappear as soon as you take it off now?”

“Way to ruin it.”

“Sorry. It just seems like the kind of thing Pepito would do.”

“Fucking bastard,” Johnny growled.

“Hey, he let you go, and you’re fine now. Don’t focus on it.”

“I’m not. You brought him up, not me.”

They were quiet for a minute or two. Edgar shifted his weight a few times and watched Johnny run a gloved hand over the back of a chair.

“It looks like they took good care of you.” Edgar said. “You were wearing that when you showed up in my bed. It’s all new isn’t it? Like they were playing some sort of fucked up dress up with you.”

“Yeah,” Johnny answered, nodding. “Even the socks were new. I don’t know what happened to whatever I was wearing before I woke up down there. I can’t figure out if I just don’t remember  _now_ , or if I didn’t remember before.” He looked up and sent a strange look at Edgar.

“What?” Edgar asked.

“What happened to me when I died?”

“I really don’t want to relive it. You’re home and you’re okay, and I was starting to feel better, why would I want to dwell on it?”

“I mean, did I get buried somewhere or something?” Johnny looked worried.

“No,” Edgar answered, shaking his head. “Pepito showed up and you just disappeared. Jimmy, Devi and Tenna saw it too. Just gone.”

“Whew, that’s good. I was worried I had two bodies now.”

“Ugh, can we not talk about this?”

“Sorry,” Johnny said, shrugging. “You don’t get to come back from the dead very often, though. It’s worth exploring.”

“I’d like you to never need to come back again, if that’s alright with you.”

“I’ll see what I can do. But only because I like you.”

Edgar’s chest still felt so tight. He watched Johnny inspect everything in the house, checking to see if it was where he thought it would be. The long coat swished around corners and trailed behind Johnny as he shuffled through the rooms. He stopped suddenly on one of his rounds through the entry way and sat down on the stairs to inspect the broken ceramic pieces that had been sitting on the stairs since the day before they’d last set out as the Homicides.

“You never picked this stuff up?” He said something to himself about why he hadn’t seen the pile there before.

“Of course not,” Edgar answered.

“You know,” Johnny said, turning some of the larger pieces over in his hands, “I was worried about you.”

“You say that like it should surprise me.”

“No, I just mean that it scared me a little that you let things get like it was.” Johnny looked around the room to his right. “This room was worse on the night I came back than the first few weekends I spent here, when I trashed it on  _purpose_.”

“Your lack of sympathy is really starting to get to me.”

Johnny blinked up at him from the step where he was sitting, titled his head to one side and squinted.

“I’ve never been terribly good at that, Edgar,” he said, smiling.

Edgar didn’t really know what it was about what Johnny had said, or if it had even been that at all, but he fell to his knees on the stairs and wrapped his arms around Johnny’s shoulders.

_“behind your face_  
 _behind your skin_  
 _behind your bones”_

“My god, I know, I know. You’re terrible to people sometimes and I feel like this anyway.  I couldn’t clean anything, I couldn’t do anything.” He spoke mostly shuddering into the leather on Johnny’s shoulder. “I couldn’t think, I didn’t know what to do with myself, I didn’t think there was any reason for me to be doing anything, I didn’t, I just… Everything shut down. And then you were there and I just, just, I wanted-”

There was the scrape of ceramic being dropped to the rest of the pile, and then arms around him.

“I know. I saw, remember?”

“I just didn’t think I’d hear you joke again, or see you smile like that or-”

“Shh, I know, I know.”

Edgar sat back on the stair, in an effort not to sob all over the hell-coat.

“I sound like a broken record yet?” he asked, trying to laugh at himself. Johnny raised an eyebrow at him.

“No, but I could fix that for you.”

“With all that could imply, I think I’ll pass.”

“Am I really terrible to people?” Johnny asked, though he didn’t sound concerned about it if it were true. Edgar brushed his fingers along the side of Johnny’s face.

“Yes,” he said, smiling fondly, “you are.”

“What the hell is wrong with you, then?”

“You,” Edgar answered.

“Eh, happens to everyone,” Johnny said, smiling. He shrugged and leaned back against the steps, looking quite pleased with himself. Edgar was prepared to drown Johnny in the longest profession of love he could fathom, but shoved him instead.

“Hey, Mister Hades, you’re not ruling over the masses up here, remember?”

Johnny smiled and reached up to trace part of Edgar’s jaw.

“Says one of my loyal followers.”

“Okay, I lose.”

Johnny laughed, and Edgar had to hold onto him again.

“You have no idea how desperately I missed that,” he nearly whispered.

“No, I think I really do.”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh, there it is. I was wondering when it would start to feel like home.”

_“I’d be rich.”_

*****

“So we have some issues here.”

“Do we?” Edgar was fairly certain he was completely fine. It was the end of the day and he had what he wanted (Johnny) where he wanted (practically in his lap), and could find no issues at all.

“Yes. You kept me from everyone.”

“Oh.  _Those_  issues.” Shit.

“It feels weird to say this, but you actually  _took advantage_  of me. What the hell happened?”

“I… I don’t know. I was horrified myself when it all happened, but I couldn’t help myself.”

Johnny laughed. “You sound like some kind of predator. Do we need to send you to rehab?”

Edgar wasn’t sure if joking back was appropriate or not. Close as he was to Johnny, judging what was and wasn’t an Earth-shattering big deal to him was a little fuzzy at times.

“It’s okay,” Johnny said when Edgar didn’t reply. “I feel like I should be more upset about this, but I’m more disturbed than angry. How the hell does someone like you get  _that_  fucked up?”

“My entire world dies in my arms?”

“Oh.”

Edgar tried to smile. “Sorry?”

“No, don’t worry about it,” Johnny said dismissively. He bit his lip for a second, but a moment later, the look Edgar had wanted to decipher was gone. “So then our other issue…”

“I did something else?”

“No, no, the thing. The thing upstairs.”

“Oh, right, with the…” Edgar made some kind of conjuring hand gesture, even though what he’d felt upstairs before his facial hair regenerated was nothing like being conjured.

“Yeah, that,” Johnny nodded. “Something changed.”

“Do we need to go see Pepito again?” Edgar asked. “Because, really, I am so fucking sick of that guy, and I’d really rather his house had just stayed a black hole.”

Johnny smiled and raised an eyebrow at Edgar. “Damn, tell me how you really feel.” Edgar glared at him. “Okay, okay. In all seriousness, though, who else do we go to when shit is fucked up?”

Edgar sighed. “Do we have to go now? I was really enjoying pretending no one else existed. Besides, I’m worried I’m going to want to tear him apart.”

“You?” Johnny snorted, trying to hold in a laugh.

“Oh, come on,” Edgar shot back. “Like all hundred and twenty pounds of you would ever put a dent in him.”

“Hey, he put me in charge of Hell for a little while. I could be intimidating if I had to be. I bet I’m faster than he is, at any rate.”

“Except he’s got crazy poofing powers,” Edgar said, wiggling his fingers near his face to illustrate his point. “And horns.”

“Because those make a difference.”

“ _Horns_ , Nny.”

“Gimme some egg whites and we can give me some horns, too,” Johnny said, fiddling with the long strings of hair near his face.

“You’d look ridiculous.”

“And so does Pepito. There, problem solved.”

“So what, you’ll just look nicer than him and that will make everything better?”

“Yeah. Have I mentioned this coat?”

“Why no. Do go on.” Edgar rolled his eyes.

“Come on,” Johnny said, lifting himself off of Edgar. “Maybe if we go now, we can still come back at a reasonable time and eat something.”

“Fine,” Edgar answered bitterly. He really hated Pepito.

*****

The house felt hotter than Edgar had remembered. Johnny walked right up to the door and pounded on it, but Edgar had wanted to wait and think the whole thing through. Part of him was still terrified of having Johnny taken from him again.

Pepito answered the door casually and then took a sharp breath when he saw Johnny.

“What do you want?” Pepito spat.

“I want to know what the hell you did to us. And what kind of fucked up little game you think you were playing back there, taking my memory.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pepito replied angrily.

“I spent weeks not knowing who he was!” Johnny yelled, pointing at Edgar. “You think I spared Squee for that?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Fuck you, you liar.”

The stood and regarded each other for a few moments. Edgar tried to resist wrapping his arms around Johnny and just running away with him to save him from whatever was coming.

“How is Squee?” Johnny asked suddenly.

“Todd’s fine,” Pepito answered. “How nice of you to ask.  Looks like your other half survived all of my horrible behavior as well. Must be lovely for you.” He looked at Edgar, and Edgar hoped he wasn’t being marked for dead. Edgar had had delusions of being aggressive and terrifying at Pepito, but instead just felt like hiding behind Johnny, who was thinner  _and_  shorter than Edgar.

“And you know nothing about this?” Johnny prodded again.

“No, but you may want to ask his book,” Pepito said, nodding towards Edgar. “You can’t blame Hell for everything.”

“Swear you knew nothing,” Johnny demanded. At that moment, Todd walked by behind Pepito, on his way to the second floor. The key that had hung on Johnny’s neck for so long, Edgar noticed, was now on Todd’s. Pepito bowed away from the door and gestured dramatically to Todd on the stairs behind him.

“I knew nothing,” he said.

Johnny nodded, thanked Pepito for something, and grabbed Edgar’s hand as he turned to leave. Edgar followed, feeling completely useless, and largely confused.

Edgar was dragged back to his house, through the front door, and up the stairs to the extra bedroom. Johnny tore through the books on the shelf, and several pictures fluttered to the floor. When he pulled down the book in question, he hesitated opening the cover and then handed it to Edgar.

“Here,” he said, “you do it.”

“Me?”

Johnny nodded. “It’s your book.”

“You yelled at the son of Satan, but you won’t open a book?”

“You won’t even do that?”

Edgar admitted defeat and opened the cover. The same opening page describing Edgar as their experimental candidate greeted him, and he flipped through the pages for some sort of hint. He reached the back of the book and realized that it was full.

“It’s all written in,” he said quietly, staring at the last page.

“What’s the last thing listed in there?” Johnny asked.

“Umm…” Edgar flipped a page back to the list of items. “The red book that was beside this one.”

“Good,” Johnny said, and he snatched the book from the desk and began tearing the pages out of it.

“Nny, what the hell?!”

“What does it say?” Johnny snapped, nodding toward the book in Edgar’s hands. Edgar looked down at the page.

“Nothing. Nothing changed.”

“So the book stopped,” Johnny said, letting the gutted book fall to the floor. “Does this mean they stopped watching you?”

“Were they ever really watching me?” Edgar asked. “I mean, you’d think they’d have smote me the moment I got close to you.”

“You’ve really got to let that go, seriously.”

“Not just  _us_ , even that you were Pepito’s hope for a free ride out of being in charge of Hell all that time. Surely they knew, especially if they… if they sent us both here for all of this.”

“Can we go somewhere to find out? You think Squee is some sort of messenger from Heaven now?”

“Nny, he was wearing Hell’s key on his neck, and I’m fairly sure he sleeps with the Anti-Christ. He’s not an angel.”

“I said ‘ _messenger_ ’,” Johnny stressed, as he left the room. “That’s not the same thing.”

Edgar leaned out of the room and saw Johnny head down the stairs. “Where  _now_? I thought you and Pepito telepathically fixed everything or something.”

“Can’t hurt to break his windows and see if I can get a different response,” Johnny answered cheerily.

“Whoa, whoa!” Edgar dropped the Heaven book to the floor, forgetting entirely to tell Johnny about the last page. “Don’t start doing crazy shit, please!” He chased Johnny down the stairs, and into the entry way. Johnny opened the door just as Edgar grabbed his shoulder.

Outside, standing on the sidewalk, looking at nothing in particular, was a woman in black. A car drove by and the reflection from the headlights slid across her glasses.

Johnny let go of the doorknob and backed into Edgar, seemingly trying to plow him over.

“Nny, what are you-?”

“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, move, move, move, close the fucking door.”

Edgar leaned over Johnny to grab the door and the woman outside looked at him. She waved. Edgar felt a chill and happily closed the door on her. Johnny was shaking in front of him.

“Nny?”

“Never mind. Let’s just stay here.”

“Was she the-?”

“Yes. That’s it, end of story, goodbye. Not talking about this anymore.” He slipped around Edgar and went to fold himself up on the pink recliner. Edgar tried to follow him to say something, or offer some kind of joke to lighten things, but even he was disturbed that the woman had turned up again.

“The book said the experiment was over,” Edgar said several minutes later, sitting on the arm of the recliner.

“Do you get to die next? That would be hilarious and definitely just what we need.”

“It acknowledged the contribution of you by Pepito in the formation of my character,” Edgar said to his feet. “I guess they all really did want to just play with us.”

“You knew that a long time ago,” Johnny replied, still with his legs tucked tightly against him.

“I liked to think they were less fucked up than that. I knew they weren’t as good as I’d been led to think, but I thought maybe we weren’t pawns as much as we were.”

Johnny got a disgusted, yet somehow amused expression on his face. “‘ _I envy your_ -’”

“Please. Don’t.”

“I was going to change it.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“You’re getting better at that.”

Edgar slid into the chair next to Johnny. The fit wasn’t terribly tight, but it wouldn’t have bothered either of them if it had been. Johnny unfolded his legs and appeared less tense.

“It seems like a horrible thing to do,” Edgar said, staring at the wall across the room. “I mean, I don’t even know who to blame. Heaven and Hell collaborated to make us both miserable? What the hell do you even say to that?”

“‘Fuck you guys’?”

Edgar laughed. “I suppose so. I guess I just can’t imagine it. Some man appeals to you, begging for a chance to make someone else happy, and you come up with this?”

“Mm.”

“Just because I’d wanted to make you happy. It seems like such a horrible thing to do to people.”

“Mm.”

“And then they took you from me, and I thought, ‘What the hell I am here for now? What do I do? The only reason I was even born again was to find Johnny and make him happy and now they’ve taken my reason for being away.’”

“Stop that.”

Edgar blinked. “What?”

“Stop saying that. Stop talking about it.”

“It’s the truth, though.”

“No it isn’t.”

“I-”

“No. It isn’t.” Johnny glared, and Edgar felt his breath leave him for a moment. “I don’t care if that’s what they sent you here for. They sent me here to die. That’s not why I exist. I did it, and it sucked, and I’m not doing it again.”

“Making you happy makes  _me_  happy,” Edgar said. “It’s really okay.”

“No it fucking isn’t.” Johnny wound his fingers into the fabric of Edgar’s shirt. “You spent a lifetime and a half trying to do this. A lifetime, Edgar, of trying to bring me some speck of happiness. And when you made me happiest, what then? They killed me. I fucking  _died_.”

“Nny, I-“

“No!” He tugged hard on Edgar’s shirt, and pulled Edgar’s nose down to meet his. “No more. I’m tired of this bullshit. You’ve taken too much abuse for this. It’s your turn now.”

Edgar felt the skin below his ears burn.

“ _I’m_  going to make  _you_  happy now.”

Edgar swore he felt something brush his lips.  “Okay,” he breathed. He felt Johnny release his shirt, and only then realized his eyes had been closed. Thin arms around his neck, and breathing on his shoulder.

“What makes you happiest?”

“You.”

“Good.” Fingers in his hair. “That sounds easy. Maybe no one will die this time.”

*****

“Want to know something, Edgar?”

“Of course.”

“I have no idea what I’m going to tell everyone.”

“What?”

“And I dream that that woman comes through the walls. And that thing at the motel does come through walls, and I think it still knows me.” A pause.  “I’m terrified of them.”

“I-”

“Just thought you should know.”

*****

“Pepito?” Todd’s fingers wrapped around the key at his neck.

“Mm?”

“What did Johnny do?”

“What?”  Pepito looked up from the lock he was repairing to see Todd’s expression not as afraid, but more as concern. “What are you talking about?”

“Why did he go to the basement? What did he  _do_?”

“He attacked you, remember?”

“But not before he died!” Todd argued. “What did he do that sent him there in the first place?”

“Nothing,” Pepito answered, resetting a loose screw. “Nothing in this life, anyway.”

“But he shouldn’t be damned for something he didn’t do.”

“He wasn’t being judged this time around. Really, he wasn’t even living except on borrowed time from me.”

“From you?”

“He was supposed to have come to Hell with me last time. His friend Edgar had better ideas. I let them borrow him, as long as I could have him back to take over for me afterwards. He could have been a saint, it made no difference.”

“And now?” Todd asked.

“Now I don’t know what they’re doing with him, but he’s none of mine anymore.”

“Wonder whose hands he’s better off in.”

“Hell if I know.”

 

*****

Johnny woke up the next morning to being shaken violently. He made some confused noises and blinked a few times to clear his vision. He was presented with Edgar staring intently at him.

“Edgar, what the fuck?”

He was promptly hauled into a sitting position and hugged tightly.

“I’m sorry. I was just worried you weren’t breathing or you wouldn’t know who I was.”

“This is going to need to stop if you want me back here tonight,” Johnny muttered.

“I’ll be fine,” Edgar said, releasing his hold on Johnny’s ribs. “I just worried it was one of those twenty-four hour kinds of blessings, and I was going to have to go through losing you in some form all over again.”

“Jeez, I’m not that much of an asshole. I’d have let you know.”

*****

The day’s mission was to bring Johnny to Devi and the others without getting noticed. Edgar said he also would have liked to not be seen, but concealing Johnny was the larger concern.

“We could dye my hair some outrageous color,” Johnny had joked.

“Because you don’t do that to it already.”

“No one would suspect green, Edgar. Seriously, though, we can’t just walk down the street under some kinda tarp and say it’s performance art?”

“I guess we could try that.”

“Or here’s an idea. Bring them here.”

“I don’t think I want them to see how bad it got in here,” Edgar said, looking around at the still-questionable room. “I used to keep it so spotless…”

“You should see Jimmy’s place.”

“Jimmy? You got to see him too?”

“Yeah, I got to watch all of you,” Johnny replied. “Lucky me.”

“What did Jimmy do to his house?”

“Tore it up. Down to the drywall. You looked fucking normal compared to him for a few days.” 

Edgar winced. “Only a few days?”

“Yeah, then he took some pills, passed out for a week and had some kind of epiphany and I never saw him again.”

“I haven’t talked to him for so long,” Edgar said. “Do you think Devi will be able to find him?”

Johnny shrugged. “You should call her and check.”

“But how are we going to get you-”

“I’ll work on it, just call her or we’ll sit here all day.”

When Devi picked up the phone, she didn’t even bother to hide her surprise.

“Edgar? Jesus Christ, what happened?! We’ve been trying to get to you for weeks! Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think so. Listen, I can’t talk long, but can I come over and see you guys?”

“Um, suuure. By ‘you guys,’ you mean…”

“All of you. Jimmy, too.”

“I’ll see if I can get him.”

“Thanks,” Edgar said, trying to maintain an even bland tone. “I’ll see you in, um…” He looked at Johnny and made an urgent face. Johnny mimed a two and a circle. “In twenty minutes?”

“Okay. Shit, we’ll be glad to see you.”

Edgar hung up and stared at the phone for a while.

“Wow, she was really happy to hear from me. Maybe I was a little worse than I thought.”

“It’s likely.”

“So how are we getting you down there?”

“I’m going to wear this coat,” Johnny said, fingertips against his chest and thus the coat, “and we’re going to duck through the alleys.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

Edgar sighed.

“Don’t worry,” Johnny said through a grin. “It’ll be fine.”

Which, of course, it was. Johnny and Edgar made it to Devi’s apartment with no trouble at all. Edgar steered clear of the Homicides’ van, which had been covered in flowers and t-shirts and whatever other offerings people had seen fit to give Johnny, but Johnny was drawn to it. Edgar caught his wrist when he strayed toward it.

“Please don’t,” he pleaded. “I know you’re okay, but it’s still not something I want to look at.”  Johnny looked disappointed, and gave one look at the van, but nodded and let Edgar lead him up the stairwells to Devi’s apartment.

Johnny slid off to the side of the door where he was sure not to be seen when it opened, and Edgar knocked.  Devi answered quickly, and hugged Edgar tightly.

“God, Edgar, we were so worried about you, we all thought you were just going to starve to death in your house and we’d never know.” She squeezed her eyes tight and stayed attached to him for a moment longer than either of them had expected.

“I needed to tell you something important,” Edgar said quietly.

“Come in, come on,” Devi said, ushering him inside. “You can tell us whatever you need to once you’ve sat down.”  She called to the others to clear a seat for him. Edgar ducked under her arm, and stepped back.

“I think it might be better out here.” He glanced to his right where Johnny was still pressed against the wall.

“Edgar, what-?”

“Boo,” Johnny whispered, leaning in front of her.

“ _HOLY FUCK_!”  She slammed the door a moment later, and Edgar heard the others inside trying to calm her down. The door opened again, and Tenna and Jimmy leaned out.

Johnny waved at them.

Tenna screamed and Jimmy kept trying to tear the door knob from her hand. Edgar held out his arm to prevent another door slamming in his face.

“Guys, guys, it’s okay!”

“Shit, shit, shit, Jimmy, go find the vacuum cleaner,” Tenna said frantically.

“You’re going to suck me into a vacuum?” Johnny asked, amused.

“It worked in that movie!”

Johnny reached out and grabbed her arm. Jimmy made a small squeak.

“I’m not-” Johnny started.

“DEVI, HE ISN’T DEAD! OH GOD, HE’S NOT DEAD!”

“Yeah, that.”

Edgar was not sure what happened in the next few moments, but he was dragged into the room by what felt like a great many more people than three, along with Johnny who seemed to be thriving in the attention.

Questions fired at both of them all at once, and everyone had to take turns making sure Johnny was really Johnny, either by looking at his skin for scars they’d inflicted, or asking him secret questions.

“Yeah, that’s definitely the one,” Devi said, looking at a mark on the back of Johnny’s neck.

“First place you kicked me,” Jimmy quizzed. 

“Left hip,” Johnny answered. “You walked crooked for a week.”

“This key,” Tenna said, pointing to one of the five in her hand.

“Janitor’s closet, upstairs bathroom, this apartment, your van, and that one’s fake,” Johnny named each of them as she pointed.

Johnny looked uncomfortable with being hugged by so many people, but permitted it anyway. Edgar felt a tightening in his chest, but it was a different sort than he’d been feeling for the last few months.

“How long have you been here?” Devi asked Johnny.  Edgar felt the tightening threaten to cut off his breathing and squeeze his heart into his stomach.

“Actually…,” Edgar began nervously. “He-”

“Just today,” Johnny interrupted. Edgar took a sharp breath and looked up at Johnny, who caught his gaze out of the corner of his eye for only a moment. “Just today,” he repeated, “but living isn’t that hard to pick up again.”

Edgar watched in near silence as Johnny explained everything, congratulated Jimmy on a building well-trashed, and showed off the coat. Somewhere in the middle of Johnny’s mini-performance, Devi started crying into her hands.

_“If we belong to each other_  
 _we belong”_

“What the hell are we going to tell everyone?” Jimmy asked while Tenna patted Devi’s head. “ ‘Cause they’re not going to believe…”

“Whatever we want,” Johnny answered. He sounded so confident, even though he’d just relayed to Edgar the night before that he had no idea how he was going to orchestrate his resurrection with the cameras. Edgar found new appreciation for being allowed to see the parts of Johnny that didn’t always know the magical answers to everything.

“Aliens?” Devi offered through sniffles.

“Sounds sort of appealing. I almost wish it had been that instead.”

“Almost?” Edgar asked. Johnny missed a beat and contemplated Edgar for a moment.

“No, I think I definitely wish it had been that instead,” he said slowly, with that treasured eye contact. His gaze went back to the others. “Pepito almost counts, right?”

“Why can’t you just be the next Jesus?” Tenna asked.

“And now she’s a marketing genius,” Johnny laughed. “The wonders never cease.”

“It wouldn’t be that inaccurate,” Jimmy pointed out.

“It would also be great to dress Edgar up as a Roman soldier.”

“I don’t think I really want to be Jesus,” Johnny said. “I’ve heard he was even lamer than Pepito. Besides,” he added with a devious grin, “I think we can come up with something better than that.”

At that moment, for the first time in months, and the second time in his life, Edgar heard the faintest strains of Johnny’s song.

_“and I hear violins”_

*****

_“Here is a song without a name  
It comes to heal your pain”_

They stood together in the room, for the first time in months, in their stars and dead make-up. Tenna had outdone herself in every sense, and the group felt more alive, and looked deader, than they ever had. Johnny had suggested they get Edgar some contacts that blacked out his eyes, but Edgar had wanted nothing to do with sticking things in his eye sockets.

_“The phone is ringing but I'm gone”_

The hum of the crowd in the room next to them grew with each passing minute. They’d gathered to hear something important about the future of the Homicides, and most were likely expecting to meet Johnny’s replacement, while the more devoted fans were calling for them to just break up if there was no Johnny.

Johnny had never looked more ready to tackle a stage. Edgar was just happy they didn’t actually have to perform. He felt sure that if he actually had to see Johnny looking this alive and screaming lyrics at a bunch of hysterical fans that any talent he had in regard to the keyboard would just cease to be.

_“You take me higher than anything has before  
You take me higher than anything has before”_

Devi listened intently to the growing noise.

“I don’t know,” she said. “This could go downhill really fast.”

Jimmy cracked his knuckles. “I think we can take ‘em,” he said.

“How many you think you got?” Edgar asked him.

“Oh, two or three,” Jimmy answered.

“Hey, great, I think if we all team up, we could mess up maybe a whole six teenage girls,” Edgar said, clapping his hands together.

“Bring ‘em on,” Jimmy grinned.

“ _Girls_  listen to us?” Johnny asked in mock surprise.

“Oh, aren’t you clever.” Devi threw a wad of paper at his head.

The crowd continued to grow to a dull roar. Tenna leaned toward the sound.

“We’re going to need to go out there soon,” she said. “Sounds like they’re going to start chanting or throwing fruit at the stage any minute.”

Devi bit her lip apprehensively, and shot a look at Johnny. “You sure about this?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“That should have stopped worrying me a long time ago, but it still does.”

_“I need to run away  
From you, from me”_

Edgar watched Johnny take in the faces of the people around him. People who’d gone through a little too much for him, but kept coming back for more of whatever strange sort of trials being near Johnny eventually unearthed. Despite that the swarms of people in the next room would all be able to see them, Johnny, Devi, Jimmy, Tenna and Edgar really were the only people in the world.

_“You take me higher than anything has before  
You take me higher than anything has before”_

“Don’t worry,” Johnny said confidently. “It will be fine.”

“Will it?”

“ _Trust me_.” The grin that meant he had it all figured out, but that he wasn’t going to share it with anyone else.

Tenna opened the door to the curtain, and stepped through the frame.

“Let’s go,” she whispered excitedly. Devi followed her, and then Jimmy. Edgar heard the crowd scream louder each time one of them stepped through the curtain in the next room.

“It’s different being last,” Johnny told Edgar as he left the room.

“Don’t worry,” Edgar said, holding out his hand. “This’ll be the only time.”

_“There's no walls between us now  
Except the ones we bring”_

“I’m not worried,” Johnny replied with his usual grin. He took Edgar’s hand and closed the door to the small room behind him.

“I know you’re not, it’s just easier to pretend you’re like the rest of us.”

The light beyond the curtain was blinding, and noise echoed through Edgar’s head. People cheered exceptionally hard for him, perhaps out of sympathy, perhaps out of joy that he’d agreed to appear in public for the first time in months. Edgar didn't care either way, and absorbed the feeling of being where he was. It wasn’t really the stage, and it wasn’t the crowd, but it was that his hand still hadn’t come out from behind the curtain.

The crowd slowed when they noticed Edgar hadn’t entirely stepped out. Edgar smiled at them, and then glanced at his fellow dead people. They nodded.

_“We waited hours for this  
Now we watch it fade”_

Edgar tugged on Johnny’s wrist and had him walk out from behind the curtain. Johnny squinted in the light, and shielded his eyes for a moment. Edgar let go of his hand and let Johnny walk to the edge of the stage. The crowd fell silent abruptly, and Johnny's boots against the wood made the only sounds for several seconds. The tightness in Edgar’s chest had returned, and he felt a bit of euphoria when Johnny turned on a microphone in a completely silent auditorium.

“Hi,” he said. “I thought I’d come back and tell you guys some stories about Hell.”

Everything exploded at the same moment – the crowd, the cameras, some speakers in the back, and, Edgar felt fairly sure, his heart.  Johnny laughed gleefully into the mic, and the noise only surged again.

Once again, something drifted into the back of Edgar’s mind. Something that wanted to weave into everything he was, and something that had its eye on everything that  _anyone_  was. Edgar looked over to see Jimmy and the others with their hands over their ears, expressions of wonder on their faces, trying to tune out what was all around them, except for the song with no words and its owner, who was still basking in the glow that Edgar felt sure everyone could see.

_“You take me higher than anything has before”_

The crowd grew quiet, waiting for Johnny to do something. He stood in silence, staring at the floor, for nearly a minute, and turned back to look at Edgar. When he spoke, it still echoed across the silent room, though it was really only directed in Edgar’s direction.

“It’s not bad for having no words.” 

  
_“above all the silence_  
 _can you hear_  
 _can you hear_  
 _laughing”_

Before Edgar could recover from the shock and come up with a witty response, Johnny’s mouth curled into a smile, and he laughed.  Edgar had never felt so incredible.

_“You take me higher than anything has before”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As it has always been planned, the last song is VAST’s ‘Song Without A Name,’ though it sounds absolutely nothing like Johnny’s. It has words, after all.  
> Any other lyrics, as you’ve hopefully noticed, are the words for all the other songs I’ve ever featured here (those that had words, anyhow).
> 
>  
> 
> Visit this chapter on my website - ladyyatexel.com - for thanks and multimedia extras.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Song Without a Name (Reprise)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2057940) by [LadyYateXel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyYateXel/pseuds/LadyYateXel)




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